So I went to the instantly sold-out pre-Michelin event at the Violet Hour last night. At least, that’s what it was supposed to be. Since there was never a moment that any Michelin person came out and said anything about anything, the only real clue that that was what it was— and not any other reason why I’d be scarfing free food and drink at the Violet Hour, which does seem to happen at least once a year— was that Michelin Guides were sitting around, free for the taking.

No, not the Chicago one.

So I chatted with some LTHers, touched base with Nick at Grub Street, finally met the lovely Patty Erd of The Spice House in person (if you want one piece of advice for Thanksgiving, go to Spice House and buy their pumpkin pie spice mix, which is doubleplusgood), met a bunch of Gaper’s Block people I had never met before, talked with Ari Bendersky of Eater Chicago about the alleged Yelp list of Michelin winners (I think it’s a plausible-looking phony, we’ll know shortly), and I think I saw Jason Lardone but didn’t get a chance to talk to him. (Actually, I thought for a moment of pulling a full Tony Clifton and going as Jason Lardone, but I just got a haircut and didn’t feel like immediately wasting it by shaving it off. I also proposed climbing onto the bar and improvising a welcome speech in half-French, half-English, but would have needed at least $100 to be barred from The Violet Hour for life, and only managed to raise about $60 from my immediate companions.)

Speaking of The Violet Hour, from which I am not barred for life, I say this unequivocally, on my index of visits I’d say this one was a definite uptick, the best since my first. There’s a new chef and the food, if less distinctively bar-like, seemed the most sophisticated and accomplished to date— I really liked the bacalao fritter, and a lamb sausage on a little slice of roasted beet in particular. Although we had a set list of cocktails to make serving en masse easier, it was no trick to walk up to the bar and request something special, and one of the bartenders (who LTHer Ursiform eventually realized had been in a band that recorded at her house— weird small world moment) was more than happy to take my vaguely inebriated desires for something unusual and translate them into, first, an excellent rum-based cocktail with black walnut liqueur, and second, a vermouth cocktail with some half-heard reference to “artichoke juice” in the description. This was better once the ice melted a bit and cut the syrupiness of the vermouth.

I’ve been meaning to get back to Big Star, people like Michael Nagrant keep raving about it, and it looked oddly quiet over there so after our drinks, we went over for some tacos to wash them down (this made sense at the time). Big Star has improved the basement-slash-submarine feel of its cold gray box space with some pink Christmas lights, which work far better than they sound. The tortillas were much improved over my previous visit, when I felt like they were rubbery and bland. But I’m still just not wild about the food there, in fact, I had pretty much the same feeling about the tacos as last time: pork belly quite good and different, chicken not bad (there’s more flavor to chicken here than at most Mexican restaurants, admittedly), the pastor, just not right. Too sweet, no crispy char-ness.

The one new thing we tried was the Sonoran hot dog, a massive, and impressively charred, beef frank allegedly wrapped in bacon (I’d say more like there’s a piece at the bottom) and then wildly overdressed with crema, beans, diced jalapenos, I don’t know what all. As Sharon Bautista said of the dressing, “It seems like the right things on it, but it’s way too much when you’re actually eating it,” you wind up basically smearing a couple of tablespoons of gooey stuff onto a napkin with every bite. It’s kind of a weird one-shot for them to be offering but I think it’s the thing I’ve liked best there to date.

Still, after two visits, I have to say that Big Star is just not the bar or the Mexican restaurant for me. Somehow I think they’ll survive, even so.

In a moment, we’ll have the real list of Michelin winners, and then… Michelin mania will be over. For at least a year or two.

BY JASON LARDONE, FooderChicago.com

When injustice besmirched the lobster bib of France in the Dreyfus case, the fearless writer Emile Zola cried out: “J’Accuse!”

Today, when another injustice is done by Frenchmen, I must be no less bold. No less courageous. No less willing to put my opinion right on the front page, with my name in type as large as Zola’s: J’Accuse!

What is it that prompts me to make this j’accusation?  Why do I willingly choose to be such a big j’acc?

It is, simply, the only choice I have when I look at the list of Bib Gourmands, the supposed list of “Chicago good values” issued by the Guide Michelin last week.  Someone has to stand up for the best in value-priced cuisine in Chicago, and as the founder, CEO, chef de content, and Chief Visionary Officer of FooderChicago.com, je suis that someone:

• Melange: Un Creperie. No, no, no, M. Naret and all your anonymous reviewers. As I made clear in my definitive post, “Puckle Density in Chicago Crepes, A Spectrographic Analysis,” Melange’s use of a powdered crepe mix results in an insufficient puckle to plane ratio of 1.6:1-1.83:1, depending on whether it’s Arturo or Manuel in the back doing the mixing. The best creperies in Paris achieve a standard of at least 2.12:1, and the anti-griddle crepes at Jean-Chauve Souris’ experimental crepe atelier Désespoir in Toulon achieve an awe-inspiring 4.67:1 (see Lardone, “The Creperies of France: A Study With My New Nikon DXL650SI” and Lardone, “I Can’t Believe Delta Won’t Let Me Use My Miles To Go To Freakin’ Paris Directly”).

• Go Thai Yourself. Really? Really, France, did your experience in Indochina teach you nothing about Asian food? Go Thai Yourself’s boat noodles are a sad, lumpish mockery of a classic dish, the gristly, wizened nam tok redefines the meaning of “insult to the customer,” and the nam khaa pla vim kra ban tuu fok Chiang Mai style is blatantly inferior to the version available on the upstairs back room secret menu tattooed on the owner’s 100-year-old mother’s inner thigh (may require anti-wrinkle cream to read completely) at Thai You Too Pal— as anyone would know who has read my extensive posts on Thai food. Did you even open your browsers, Team Michelin? Why do you even go out to eat if you aren’t willing to do due diligence? The best you can say for Go Thai Yourself is that the hostess, Gum, is an especially attractive young lady whose pert breasts exhibit all the perfection of form, shapeliness and jiggle sadly lacking in the chive dumplings. Um, now that I think about it, this one was fine, actually.

• Ye Scurvy Dog. I am shocked at the inclusion of this pathetic old school excuse for a Chicago fish and chips house. Yes, it may have been popular with vintage celebrities such as Mitzi Gaynor, Gordon McRae and Cardinal Mindszenty back in the 1950s and 1960s, but we’re not living in Kup’s Chicago any more. What makes this choice such a mockery of everything I have devoted my life to (see Lardone, Dreams From My Waiter, coming Spring 2011 from Harper Collins Perennial) is that it continues to serve the style of fried fish I call “fish kugel,” in which the fish is encoated in a gummy, flavorless batter which quickly turns insipid with exposure to air. True fish and chips devotees such as myself know that only a light cornmeal-based dusting achieves the perfect viscosity-to-aeration ratio which allows the full flavor of the tilapia to shine through.

When you review this sorry list you wonder how anyone could be so far astray from the truth of Chicago dining, which can easily be found via my blog (follow me on Twitter: TheLardone). Far better choices for the visiting European to gain a real sense of our city’s bounty would have been the shrimp dosa at Klang, the pork intestine panini at Uub, or the Lemonhead pot stickers at The Sheepman. How can anyone know Chicago who has not tasted the bacalao testa at Archerman & Trenchfoot, the delicately piney piquancy of the mulattoes y castratos at El Muerte de Castro, the Imploding Plasma-State Margarita at Cassowary, or the crabapple-based giardinera at Sal’s South Pulaski No Loitering? The answer is as stark as the shuttered Mister Freeze of my youth: they can’t. And much as it pains me to have to say it, if they come to Chicago clutching the Michelin Guide instead of FooderChicago.com on their iPhone (get the FooderChicago app at iTunes, $1.99), they won’t.

Chantico is an attractive Mexican restaurant a little ways past one of my earlier discoveries, the grocery store and restaurant Ricardo, on Diversey west of Pulaski. The neighborhood is from Jalisco, mostly (the shop names make that fairly obvious), but one of Chantico’s specialties is apparently enchiladas poblano, which is to say, enchiladas in the style of Pueblo. I asked the owner if he was from Pueblo, and the answer I really got was no, he was from long experience in the restaurant biz in Chicago.

Which is a good and a bad thing, when it comes to opening a Mexican restaurant that’s a little nicer than most of the hole-in-the-wall joints around you. The bad part is if you’re tempted to remake Mexican food in a more American dining style. This is the problem I have even with some of our best alumni-of-Bayless places— summed up by the little Chichen-Itza pyramid of rice next to the steak that you often see in upscale Mex. Basically you’ve taken Mexican flavors and used them in an entirely American way of dining, a big piece of protein and a side of rice; it’s the same steak and starch you’d get in a Wisconsin supper club, with a taste of Mexico spooned over the top. Even when Mexicans eat steak and a side of rice, that’s not really how they eat it; it’s essentially an American fusion dish, invented here to match American preconceptions about what makes a $22 entree.

Does that matter? Wouldn’t you rather have a pumpkinseed mole on your steak than A-1 or Heinz? Now we’re getting into the same debate I had with myself over Chizakaya and izakayas. Inauthentic is fine so long as it’s good… but I want to be able to find authentic, too.

And to get back to Chantico, I liked the authentic things I had here a lot. Starting with the salsas, housemade, with hand-roasted chilis in them. The front one is a smoky arbol, the rear salsa verde, and both pleased me with the full rounded flavor of fresh ingredients, even bringing out a little sweetness as well as considerable heat in the salsa verde.

I tried a pork adobado taco, as an appetizer, or maybe a control. I liked it a lot, about as well as any non-spit pastor-type taco I’ve ever had. The adobado didn’t seem to be just out of a Goya can but to have well-rounded flavor, the pork was cooked to order and tender and juicy.

Then there was what was supposed to be a torta. Except it had been changed in all sorts of ways. Instead of a thin slice of tough beef, there was a tender, freshly-grilled to medium piece of thicker steak. Instead of a crispy torta roll, there was a kind of pretzel bun, like on the burger at Kuma’s. Here something that works fine as it is had been Americanized halfway out of recognition. But you know what? Even with the manifest wrongness of the pretzel bun this was a pretty tasty sandwich, and I was happy to find its second half waiting for me in the fridge the next day. It’s just not an authentic one. But when the owner is telling you how it matters to him to use good beef and cook it right, what are you going to do, tell him, no, you should use the cheap gristly stuff everybody else uses and cook it to roofing tile like they do? They didn’t have to close Cemitas Puebla to open Chantico, they both exist in Chicago right now. Good for him for having pride in his quality ingredients.

So Chantico is an attractive place, with a committed owner who could use some business. If you want authenticity, quiz him a little about how things are made before ordering. But I’ll be back for several things on the menu, including the enchiladas poblano and the fish tacos. That’s the kind of thing where I think his pride might make for a particularly strong example of the form.

Chantico Mexican Grill
4457 W. Diversey
(773) 687-8604

* * *

And so I come to the end of my effort to discover 50 restaurants that had never been reviewed on LTHForum, which began over two years ago here. At the time I felt that LTHForum, which I helped found, had grown stale, people eating at the same places over and over again (I joked to a friend about making “LTH Greatest Hits Tour” T-shirts listing dates of revisits to the likes of Lao Sze Chuan, Myron and Phil’s, etc.) I wanted to prove that there was plenty more out there to be found— and I think I did; though many of the places proved to be ordinary, and more than a few have since closed, the list’s discoveries came to include a great middle-eastern place in a whole enclave of middle-eastern food on the south side, a whole genre of supermercado taquerias (I eventually decided not to count them towards the 50, because they’d have been a third of the total list), a music venue hidden in a grocery store, and more. (You can find them all by clicking Restaurant Reviews under Categories, and looking for the reviews with numbers in the titles.)

So what was the point of this exercise? I actually had the discussion about that a few months back on LTHForum itself, when I protested the fact that discussion had shifted so much toward Burger King, Five Guys, Chick-Fil-A and other such fast food things. My point was, we had lowered the barrier to entry too much, if people could participate with nothing more than frickin’ Burger King to offer their fellow foodies; at the very least you should have to talk about your local taqueria or whatever. As I noted a while back, Wendy Aeschlimann summed up my side of the argument admirably:

People can post about anything they want. That said, I find it exceedingly odd that the food that is “capturing the imagination” of this board lately is mass-produced, of inferior quality, involves CAFO meat, “prepared” by a teenager trained by corporate, and available on every toll road. I don’t get it. One of the reasons we all live in a big city is precisely so we don’t have to regularly eat that stuff — much less discuss it.

Frankly, I’m surprised this was even controversial; it wouldn’t have been when LTHForum was started. But this isn’t the first place where mediocrity has snuck in under the guise of “tolerance.” In any case, my 50-unreviewed-restaurants project was mentioned as evidence that all the continents hadn’t been discovered yet; that there were great rewards out there for the adventurous foodie, if only you would get off your butt and look for them.

I still believe that’s true— but I also think something else has shifted in the six years since LTHForum first came along. Part of the reason the core group of us who started LTHForum, or were central to its early growth, got so enthused about cheap ethnic dining was because fine dining, which was all the media talked about then (with a few honorable exceptions— the Reader on occasion, the Cheap Eats column in the Tribune), just didn’t seem that interesting much of the time. We weren’t prejudiced against it per se— I made my name on Chowhound in 2002 with an epic recounting of the 23-course meal at Trio prepared by a promising young chef named Achatz— but we certainly found it far from the only, or even most, exciting thing happening in food locally.

There was one mainstream media review of an upscale restaurant that always stuck in my mind. It was a fake pan-South American joint near Navy Pier called De La Costa, and the reviewer (a big one to this day) was talking about some martini glass containing a few spoonfuls of ceviche… for $50. Which he seemed to think was an okay deal, and I thought was insane. Of course, difference #1 is that he had an expense account for such follies, and I don’t. So right there was a reason why I felt more inclined to trust my fellow LTHers, who would go out and find ceviche for $8.95 in some Latino neighborhood that would blow this stuff away. And that is why LTHForum mattered, because it knew how to respond to a bullshit dish from a bullshit restaurant like that with something practical and good, that made you feel smart for preferring it to what the suckers eating downtown were paying too damn much for.

Not a $50 martini glass of ceviche.

The first thing that changed over time was that the media started paying more attention to what we paid attention to (and even sometimes hiring us to cover it). New outlets like Time Out Chicago included the ethnic food/neighborhood scene in their coverage as a matter of course, and the ones that already did cover it did more of it, because we proved there was a receptive audience interested in it. Increasingly when somebody would do a “100 best things we ate” list, it would be spotted with the things we cared about and turned people on to, Burt’s Pizza and Cemitas Puebla and Katy’s Dumplings.

But what also has changed is that dining in Chicago has changed. The use-every-part-of-the-pig, simple-farmer’s-market-tastes ethos that has come to dominate at least the middle of the high end— what David Hammond calls the non-interventionists, as opposed to the molecular gastronomists— has had the effect that fine dining now has a lot more of the virtues that our little ethnic places once had for us. They’re serving food that’s not gussied up and artsy-fartsy, but sings of its authentic flavors and peasanty pleasures. It’s certainly why my blog is about a lot more medium-high-end dining these days than it was even when I started it; that scene’s just a lot more exciting to me than it used to be.

But those places are on the media’s radar in a way that taquerias never were; no LTHer is ever going to discover the next Purple Pig, because the next Purple Pig has a PR person working the media three months before opening. So the discussion on a board like LTH— and the same is true of Yelp, and the blogs, and so on— is never going to lead on those places. That’s why, what LTH is talking about this month, is what was in Time Out last month, or three or six months ago. This still has value— you get a picture of how restaurants evolve, which you don’t from some magazine or newspaper laying down the law on a place once in an official review. But it’s a different thing; it doesn’t have the thrill of uncovering hidden worlds that we once knew when Devon and Chinatown and Maxwell Street first began to divulge their secrets to us, now almost a decade ago.

So I’m done trying to school LTHForum on finding new places. Its job now is real-time vox populi reviewing, hopefully about places more worthy than Chick Fil-A. Me, on some days my goal is to be Jonathan Gold, the guy who knows every taqueria in town; other days, it’s to not worry about being something and to do more, sell more pieces and get wider exposure. (Some of that’s in the works, stay tuned.) But at least I can say, there’s no doubt, the city hasn’t been picked clean yet. I found 50; there has to be yet another one, somewhere near you.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend the screening of my own video at the Chicago Food Film Festival, but there are reports on the evening here at LTHForum, and Happy_Stomach/Sharon links to several of the other films so you can see some of them.

I did a shortened version of Pie As a Lifestyle for the festival, focusing on Hoosier Sugar Cream pie and the whole issue of our pie heritage. Here’s my 6-1/2 minute abridged version, which you can compare with the original here.

“Pie As a Lifestyle” Cutdown from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

Chicago Food Film Festival 2010 Trailer from George Motz on Vimeo.

New York’s smash hit food film festival comes to Chicago next weekend, with some of the most popular films screened in New York as well as Chicago’s own Sky Full of Bacon… and food provided by some of Chicago’s coolest food providers.

Specifically, my “Pie As A Lifestyle” will be shown in the Friday night program, which will be followed by tastings… of the Hoosier sugar cream pie talked about in the video, among others.

The festival is at the Museum of Contemporary Art warehouse, 1747 W. Hubbard; doors open at 7, movies start at 8. Friday’s program, “Savory and Sweet,” also includes “Eat Your Fill,” in which a man plans to eat everything that’s either deep-fried or on a stick at the Wisconsin State Fair, and “The Perfect Oyster,” among others. Saturday’s program includes clips from “Hamburger America,” the Chicago premiere of “Beer Wars,” and burgers by DMK Burger Bar.

Find out more about the fest here. And use the promo code “BACON” to save when you order tickets.

So when I was doing Grub Street Chicago last month, I went into Black Dog Gelato (that almost rhymes) with my kids to do a quickie interview. And while we were there, a video crew from the local ABC affiliate came in for a magazine show about stuff going on in Chicago called 190 North…

Okay, it’s announcement time. Yeah, that’s what you come to a blog for. But if you came here to read this much, you might as well know where I’ll actually be this week:

• I will be guest-blogging this week at Grub Street Chicago, synthesizing and regurgitating Chicago food news while the regular regurgitator, Nick Kindelsperger, is on vacation. So go there and while it won’t be very much like Sky Full of Bacon, I hope it will be interesting all the same. (UPDATE: For the historical record, this links you to my five days of work: M Tu W Th F)

• I’ll be on vacation the two weeks after that, but I have two book reviews ready to go up during those weeks, so come by to check out those, at least.

• There haven’t been as many Sky Full of Bacon videos this year, it’s true. Partly this has been the busy-ness of life— hey, part of the point was to help get me assignments, and once they come, that eats into videomaking time; and that’s not even counting how time-consuming things like the kids getting into baseball get. Nevertheless, I am happy to say that two are in the works, so there will be at least two more during 2010. I haven’t forgotten video, in fact, I’m kinda raring to get back at it… when I get back.

Have a good summer, eat crazy summer food, read Grub Street, see you soon.

UPDATE: I tweeted this last week, might be worth sharing here.

Three things I learned doing Grub Street: 1. People are still paying for astonishingly bad PR pitches.

2. Meanwhile, contacting restaurant, offering coverage that costs them nothing if they’ll just email their menu results in dead silence.

3. There is basically no way to find anything on a newspaper site that you don’t already know exists.

Myles and his first lamb, Triskaidekaphobia, in 2008.

I was talking to the restaurant publicist Ellen Malloy the other night at the debut of Chuck Sudo’s Goose Island beer, and of course the Lollapalooza kerfuffle came up (I mention this in part to get out of the way the fact that I will have a guest column at RIA Unplugged about that today). And one thing I said was that part of what I like about food as a journalistic subject is… you don’t have to take it so seriously. It’s just food, not politics or something.

But, of course, food isn’t just food, and sometimes it actually is politics. And sometimes those politics strike close to the heart of a parent with two sons doing 4-H. I wouldn’t have thought that that would be one of the more controversial aspects of my life, the fact that my kids go do farm chores a couple of times a week up at Wagner Farm in Glenview, but that’s exactly what it proved to be twice during the last week.

The first thing was an article I saw a link to, about how colleges allegedly discriminate against lower-income whites, Asians, etc. Frankly the article was kind of rightwing-screedy and not entirely convincing, but the interesting nugget in it was a reference to a study that seemed much more solid, and a few days later Ross Douthat wrote about that in a more credible fashion at the New York Times:

Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities…

…cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”

It will be grimly ironic indeed if my kids, raised on a street where lesbian moms come close to outnumbering two-heterosexual-parent households and no Prius is complete without its Obama sticker, who go to the hippie school and have a stay-at-home Dad who lives in his own weirdly erudite world of obscure silent movies and ethnic food, can’t get into Snootmore because they mistake us for 1950s Mormons.

I’m not going to touch the more partisan political implications of all this red state-vs.-blue state anger and paranoia, but let’s just say that nothing I’ve learned about food over the last several years makes me the least bit surprised that 2010’s movers and shakers get freaked out by the thought of actually having farmers’ kids walking among them, even as they ooh and goosh over the produce at their farmer’s market every Saturday morning. As Mark Mendez says in my latest video, people are so disconnected from where our food comes from, from the whole culture that produces food. Go back four generations in almost anyone’s family and you’ll hit a farmer, but we who buy denuded squares of meat in yellow styrofoam trays and expect to be able to buy cherries and asparagus for Christmas dinner are pretty much completely alienated from anything resembling natural reality. We can tolerate a lot, but raising animals to feed people— that’s the one alternative lifestyle that’s just too, too strange.

And that alienation has to have some effect on us as a society; politicians who grow up believing that you can just order anything to happen are going to look at the world differently from those who grow up acutely aware that whatever Man plants, Nature will do what She pleases about it. I’m not saying a few years of planting tomatoes only to see the squirrels ravage them would have turned Rod Blagojevich into Thomas Jefferson, but it might have taught him at least a few valuable lessons about the limits of human vanity.

So from an early age I’ve tried to get my kids involved with the natural world. And they themselves chose to do 4-H; Myles, my 11-year-old, is now in his third year of raising a lamb, and my 8-year-old, Liam, has joined him at it. I’ve never done a full video project about that experience, because it’s just too hard to do that and be a parent of a kid in the program at the same time, but you can get something of the flavor of their experience from two videos I made the first year, the one at the top and this one:

I feel they’re learning important things about responsibility, about leadership, about presentation skills, about caring for animals, about the natural world, about working with others collaboratively, about all kinds of things that you’d think would be valuable at Snootmore and in life. And if Old Snootie doesn’t want that, well, I don’t consider that a damning comment on my children’s values, let’s put it that way.

* * *

But then I learned that I wasn’t making the Jeffersons of tomorrow, oh no. I was cruelly breeding heartless psychopaths!

Two articles about the 4-H activities at Wagner Farm in Glenview, and the Lake County Fair next weekend (where they’ll show their animals and then auction them off) appeared in an online citizens-media offshoot of the Tribune, Trib Local. One is my friend Cathy Lambrecht’s real-world account. The other, which appears to have since been deleted (possibly because it related to a specific protest Saturday morning— um, that’s really fostering citizen media there Trib Local, deleting active, popular stories), reported on/advocated for efforts by some animal rights organization to get/force Wagner Farm and the Glenview Clovers 4-H club to free the livestock and turn them over to some supposed “animal sanctuary.” Despite differing starting points, both pieces were quickly overrun by comments of the same vegetarian/stop-the-cruelty bent. The latter piece was simply riddled with misconceptions and sensationalized falsehoods:

“The children and their families think that the Wagner Farm animals live out their entire lives on the farm,” said Garrett. “We doubt that the 4H children, let alone the Glenview community, have any knowledge of [their animals being slaughtered].”

Of course, asking a parent in the program would have immediately exposed the absurdity of this claim. The program is about raising livestock, and with many rural kids in the program, no kid is in doubt about what that means. For my part, before we let Myles enter the program, we had a long talk about what would happen to his animal at the end, and he understood and accepted that. Here he is last year, talking about it:

I think that’s a kid who has thought seriously about the issues, and still is. There’s nothing blind, deluded, or unthinking about his involvement in the program.

In true internet fashion, teh real crazy comes out in the comments. Really, by allowing my kids to learn where their food comes from, I’m doing something that proves I’m an unfit parent:

4-H teaches kids to harden their hearts, to overcome their natural empathy toward animals, to become inured to inflicting violence and death on the innocent. What a terrible thing to do to chilldren, and to animals.

This does not make “enlightened” kids – It makes hardened, numb kids that grow up to be hardened, numb adults, that continue the sad and vicious cycle on their own kids as well

Where does this sort of behavior lead us?

Killing, wars, and violence toward other, that’s where!

It’s only possible to view ordinary farming— actually, rather better than ordinary farming on any measure of humane treatment and ethics toward animals and the planet— as such an alien, violently atavistic practice if you’re already completely alienated from any reality that has to do with where your food comes from and who makes it for you.

So I invite you to do what my kids have done: become less alienated from your food. Meet the 4-H kids for yourself, talk to them about their experiences, have a good old-fashioned time at the Lake County Fair. The fair’s website is here; the auction will be Saturday at 1, but the animals should still be at the fairgrounds till Sunday evening, I believe. There are rides and corndogs and all kinds of old-timey fun.

Oh, and if you want to follow Michelle Hays’ advice:

the poster on the vegetarian article is asking people to write to the Glenview Park District to remove the program from Wagner Farm and to take the animals to a “sanctuary.” I followed the link and did the opposite.

Here’s where you can weigh in.

Sometimes you feel like you’re on a movie set in Chicago. Years ago I was walking down Rush Street and I saw a sailor, in his white sailor suit and cap and black cross tie, pop his head out of the top of a limousine and toss a flower to a pretty girl who was walking by, as if he were Gene Kelly in an MGM musical.

I kind of felt like that at the Chicago Reader’s party last night; the setting (an ex-factory loft space filled with oh-so-political art) and the crowd (hipster) was such a perfect picture of Friday night in the big city.  I’m sure many of these kid-free people actually do something like this every Friday night, but it’s been long enough since I was one of them that it felt kind of hyperreal to me.

The party, which my associate Dr. Hammond said was much more elaborate than past Reader events, was to celebrate the Best of Chicago issue, and bring together Reader staffers, Reader contributors, and people honored in the Best of.  But all I saw and met was people I already knew from the restaurant biz, like Barry Sorkin of Smoque or Nick Kokonas of Alinea; the only Reader person I met the whole night was Cliff Doerksen at the very end, literally on the way to the parking lot as I was leaving.  (I congratulated him on his James Beard award, and told him how much I hated him.)

I heard that some Reader folks might have been boycotting it because of the firing of editor Alison True, or simply didn’t feel like going to a party right after that (which may be a distinction without a difference).  I expect the management felt it was important to hold the party anyway, or maybe especially now, to help get past the bad feelings.  Yet they weren’t really there either, in actuality or spirit.  I think they should have taken the risk of the Reader’s notoriously rambunctious staff booing them or whatever, and taken a microphone at some point and made a real statement of… something or other.  Brass balls and alligator-hide skin have never been bad things for a publisher to have, and tend to earn the respect of a rebellious staff.  As it was, it kind of felt like the Reader threw a party but had somewhere else to be that night.

Thanks for the food and drink, though, guys.  This was the best cocktail of the night, Adam Seger’s Hum botanical spirit mixed (by Seger himself) with I think lavender-jasmine tea or some such thing.  Very floral, but Hum is great stuff.  Also enjoyed Smoque brisket, Mundial Cocina Mestizo tamales, some tasty meatballs from Sable, cake balls from Bleeding Heart Bakery, and so on.  (I also couldn’t help but think of the recent scandal over a blogger getting his wedding catered by restaurants he covered.  Those naughty bloggers!)

The Hammonds demonstrate their bona fides as good citizens of the People’s Republic of Oak Park.

I salute this woman for seizing her Marilyn Monroe moment and not minding if a total stranger took pictures of it.  Like I said, sometimes life is like the movies.

Another blogger, one with a paying gig, mentioned to me the other day that she was going to have to start doing video for her job.  There’s an idea for a blog post from me if ever I heard one!  Lots of journalists are doing video these days and lots of them, sad to say, are doing video that doesn’t live up to the polish and professionalism of their writing.  So I thought I’d put down a few pointers about how to make a basically competent, interesting, well-enough-made video, based on the… well, I don’t even want to think how many hours I’ve shot by now, but I’ve created enough finished product to have made Lawrence of Arabia already, with a Bowery Boys movie as a chaser.

Note that these are not trying to teach you how to make videos exactly like I do stylistically, or even in a similar format but with your own style.  This is strictly about basic pointers, self-preservation for getting something you can work with to make something worth showing in the end— on a consumer-level camera with no crew or any other form of professional support. And though food is obviously my example, the advice here is pretty much applicable to any subject which an ink-stained reporter might find himself suddenly charged with making video about.  I will start with the three things you have to, HAVE TO, pay critical attention to, and then follow up with a few secondary pointers.

THE THREE THINGS YOU HAVE TO GET OR DO TO MAKE A VIDEO:

1. Visuals
No shit, Cecil B., you say.   But it’s not enough to simply point your camera wherever your eye looks and think you’ll have a movie in the end.  Basically you need to focus on actively getting three forms of visuals:
• Master shots
• Insert shots
• Money shots

For instance, if you’re doing interviews, then the interviews are the thing you need to get first; they’re your master shot, the shot that provides the framework for everything else.  And to get that, you need to point your camera at the person talking.  And keep it there until you get the whole piece.  They will say “Watch while I do this” and then what you need to do is IGNORE their direction to move the camera and look at what they’re doing and keep it on them while they talk.  Or, you need to make it clear to them that they have to stop talking while you get the shot.  But what they’re doing will be an insert shot into this master shot.  So get your master shot, then take the time to get your inserts, one by one.

Inserts, as noted, are the closeups of plates or action or whatever that you put into your master shot.  You need these not only because people will naturally want to see what is being talking about, but because you’ll use them in editing to hide cuts and pace the piece. Don’t expect to get these on the fly; even the cameramen on Top Chef often barely manage to grab these before food is gone, you’ll often see one that’s borderline out of focus or whatever, because it’s all they got in the hurry of competition.  Plan to take some time at beginning or end to systematically capture these and have a full library of them when you’re done.  You’ll always wish you had more.

And money shots… no, it’s not just about food porn.  A money shot is the cool shot that everybody remembers afterwards, the one that tells the whole story, almost, in a single image.  When you get one you know it.  When the guy at Sun Wah inflated a duck with a gas station air hose, I knew I had a money shot.  When the whitefish fishermen were pulling rope from the water against a painterly sky like sailors in Moby Dick, it was a money shot.  This is just a matter of watching for gold out of the corner of your eye… while you do everything else.

Do you really need insert and money shots while doing a 90-second standup interview with somebody?  Well, no, I guess not.  But anything more elaborate than that will benefit from even a little careful thought and artistry applied to making sure you tell your story with images as well as with words. And that’s the difference between you telling the story and some bystander merely capturing it with their cell phone.

2. Sound
Another no shit item, you say, but it’s critically important.  Especially if you’re working on one of those little Flip cameras or something.   You’ll be shooting under noisy conditions, guaranteed, so you need to know what it takes to get decent, audible sound out of whatever camera you have.  So at least wear an earpiece to make sure you’re getting something— a pro would wear complete headphones and only hear the captured audio, but I usually do it with half a set of earbuds in one ear— and do what you gotta do, such as getting up close and, again, capturing the whole thing, don’t move the camera away if it means the mic will be moving away too.

Somebody once sent me some Flip video they’d taken of a chef at work and asked if I could help clean up the sound.  The problem was, they’d shot the work, not the chef talking, and as a result, aimed the mic at the food the whole time, not at the chef’s mouth.  Understandably, they’d focused on the visuals, but the result was that the audio just wasn’t there; there’s nothing you can do about it at that point.  Know what you’re getting while you’re getting it.

3. Edit, Edit, Edit!
It floors me when good journalists who’d sweat a print piece to perfection put a 5 minute unedited take up on the web.  The falloff in viewership during the first minute must look like a black diamond ski run.

If someone’s making a blintz, we don’t need to see the whole thing from start to finish.  Cut it down, cut to the interesting steps, cut down what they say to get to the heart of the matter, cut out the uhs and false starts and cover them with an insert shot.  But cut, cut, cut, tighten, tighten, tighten, until you reach the point that there’s nowhere in your piece where you feel tempted to click to something else, and the whole thing surprises you that it ran seven minutes because it only felt like three or four.  Editing is so easy in programs like iMovie, it takes no skill (I use Final Cut, which takes a little but is hardly rocket science).  Your movie is made in editing the way your story only happens once you actually start typing; everything up to that point is just gathering raw material.

So those are the big three you can spend a lifetime getting better at.  Here are some pointers based on experience, sometimes bitter, hardwon experience:

• Keep it steady, stupid… You can get by with some shakycam as you get your inserts, say, but if you’ve got a talking head, try to keep it as steady as possible.  The best investment I ever made was $150 for this, I use it everywhere, but I also shoot handheld all the time… but try not to let it show too much.  Steadiness in your master shot plus a more rough and ready style in your inserts cuts together very well and feels lively, yet won’t make anybody nauseous.

• …Especially if you’re using a Flip-style camera. The shotgun style of shooting handheld is natural for shooters and audiences.  The idea of holding something shaped like a deck of cards is not; there’s still something alien to us as viewers about the way people shoot with that shape and weight, including a temptation to whip it around.  Think of it as weighing ten pounds in your hand, and move it slowly and deliberately, like a barge.  The video below was obviously shot with one, and it’s not a bad thing by any means, but I think you can just feel that it’s coming from something light and flimsy that jerks around too easily.  Give it the heft of a big camera as you shoot.

• Vary your shots… especially if you’re using a Flip-style camera. There’s a temptation, especially with a small camera, to treat it like an extension of your eyes and shoot from your own perspective.  Actually slightly below your eye level is often better because it makes your subjects a little heroic (unless it just makes them fat).  But change viewpoint from time to time, including at different stages in your interview, just for visual relief.  And get on top of the food and get it from whatever angle makes a great shot.

• Kill any background audio you can. Music will mess up your ability to cut, even if you don’t care about rights issues.  It’s also distracting.  If people are banging stuff, see if you can get them to take a break, or just go somewhere else.  There’s no such thing as clean audio around food, and they’re not going to shut off a walk-in fridge for you, but do what you can.

• Clean your lens frequently. Food splatters, ’nuff said.  I’ve discovered a glob on my lens just small enough to not show up on the LCD viewfinder more times than I care to remember. (Forget expensive lens cleaning stuff, get a lens cloth and a bottle of saline solution at the drugstore.)

• Script some interview questions ahead of time. You won’t remember everything while you’re worrying about everything else in a shoot.  Also, you sound much better asking “How did you become interested in broccoli?” rather than “Okay, so I know— well, I read that piece that called you like the king of broccoli, not that you don’t do other, you know, like vegetables and stuff, and I was wondering— I mean, was there, you know…”

• Don’t talk over your interview subjects. Try to keep their speech as clean and whole as possible.  Don’t have a conversation unless you really want your voice in there.  Phrase a question, then let them talk and finish, completely.  You’ll be glad you did when you’re trying to cut it.

• Don’t talk too much, period. If you have to explain everything with narration, it might as well be a print piece.  I work hard at paring my setup down to as much haiku-like brevity as I can.  It may not seem like it at first, but listen to the opening of my Chef/Farmer video, say, and see how quickly and briefly I set up a whole bunch of concepts about their relationship and the issues of scaling up artisanal farming.  Then… I shut up for the whole of Mark Mendez’s part, and my voice only pops up a couple of times with David Cleverdon to pose questions.  It’s not about me; I get my viewpoint in because I get final say on what they say.

• Don’t shoot too much. Steve Dolinsky said this and frankly, it’s one I don’t follow, because I’m not on deadline, and I can take two months to boil four hours of conversation into ten minutes. (I put long conversations on my iPod and listen to them while I cook or drive the kids to school, to find out where the best parts are without having to watch the same shot for four hours.) But if you have to finish your video in a day, exercise some editing control while shooting and get the key points down quickly from your subject so you have 20 minutes of raw footage to go through, not 6 hours (which is not at all unusual for me, but again, I’m not trying to make tonight’s 6 o’clock news).

• Charge your batteries and remember to pack them. Not that I ever made a bonehead rookie mistake like that, oh no.