Ukulele?

Those Four Irresistible Strings
By ALLEN SALKIN

EVERYTHING began falling into place for Jen Kwok once she decided to buy a pink ukulele.

Last summer she was living in Hell’s Kitchen, working as a finance manager for a nonprofit arts company and having little success with her forays into stand-up comedy.

Then her boyfriend bought himself a natural wood ukulele. She started strumming it, and found it easy to play with little training.

Within a month Ms. Kwok had fulfilled a childhood desire to own a pink instrument, acquiring a ukulele in that color and adding it to her act. Her corny jokes (“I don’t understand why they call it lubricant. It should be lubri-can.”) worked better when she strummed.

By November, NBC was flying her to Burbank, Calif., to perform for casting directors at a talent showcase. She has since quit her job and is now auditioning for sitcoms and movie parts.

“The ukulele is a happy instrument,” she said last week. “People’s eyes light up when I step up with it.”

Suddenly there’s something irresistible again about ukuleles. What Ms. Kwok stumbled into is an international voraciousness for all things having to do with the tiny four-string instrument. From wildly popular Web videos to car commercials and concert stages, the ukulele, born in Hawaii more than a century ago, is gently plunking heartstrings everywhere. More

My Beautiful London?

My Beautiful London
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: August 8, 2008

One of the most revealing insights into Britain’s recent social history comes early in “My Son the Fanatic,” Hanif Kureishi’s tender and darkly prescient 1997 film. It’s morning in an unnamed city in northern England, and Parvez, a secular Pakistani immigrant taxi driver brilliantly portrayed by Om Puri, watches Farid, his increasingly devout college-age son, sell his electric guitar. “Where is that going?” Parvez asks Farid as the buyer drives off. “You used to love making a terrible noise with these instruments!” Farid, played by Akbar Kurtha, looks at his father with irritation. “You always said there were more important things than ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ ” he says impatiently in his thick northern English accent. “You couldn’t have been more right.” More

Big Sur

The Way We Eat
Wood-Fired
By CHRISTINE MUHLKE
Published: August 8, 2008

When I visited Big Sur Bakery in March, I had no idea it would be so much in the news by July. I’d heard about the bakery and restaurant through my friend Liz, who had returned from a month in the coastal California hamlet and e-mailed me about their chocolate-chip cookies in capital letters. The visit confirmed that the cookies were uppercase material, with multiple exclamation points for the breakfast pizza, a life-changing pie of bacon, eggs and cheese that will make scallion skeptics rethink that ’70s garnish. Then last month, when I wrote the co-owner and pastry chef Michelle Rizzolo for recipes, she said she’d do what she could before they had to evacuate. The restaurant’s pizza oven wasn’t the only thing burning in Big Sur. More

Amy Tan Q&A

Questions for Amy Tan
The Good Daughter
By DEBORAH SOLOMON
Published: August 8, 2008

You wrote the libretto for your first opera, “The Bonesetter’s Daughter,” which will have its premiere at the San Francisco Opera next month and is based on your novel of the same name. What led you to take up opera? It started on my 50th birthday, in a way, when my friend Stewart Wallace composed two pages based on the first three lines of the book as a birthday present. Stewart ended up pushing me into the opera. More

Da Grey Lady

Editorial
The United States v. the Driver
Published: August 9, 2008

Last week was hardly the first time that we have found ourselves scratching our heads in anguished confusion about what, exactly, President Bush is trying to achieve by trashing the Constitution at Guantánamo Bay. But the sentencing of Osama bin Laden’s driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, to five and a half years in prison is a good moment to stop and reflect. More

Polls and pundits

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Lab

Out in the wild's o' pretend Loft City

Sun getting lower...

On what has to have been one of the bestest summer days here in Minneapolis. It was downright cool last night and early this morning. The current temperature is 73.7 degrees fondly Fahrenheit, humidity 44% and the dew point is 51 degrees.

Today Wilson and I went out for Dim Sum at the Mandarin Kitchen. Then Amy came by, scooped Wilson up, and I drove down to see a Fringe show at the Jeune Lune. Then Wilson and I went the Lab to see another show. After the show, we headed for the Ritz Theater for Little Yellow Diary. Rather than wait in line at the Ritz, we ducked into a bar, where we ran into Yolanda having hot sausages and a bloody Mary. We got our tickets and headed in where I saw Michael from the Illusion, so we went up and sat in back of him. After the show, Yolanda and Wilson headed off to the Soap Factory, and I headed home after using all of my punches.

My ten:
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