John Baker’s Blog

The German film, The Lives of Others has been released as a DVD. Paul Cantor has an extensive review of it in Christianity Today, claiming it to be the best feature film début by a director since Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. My own review is here.
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Do read Alex Witchel’s piece in The New York Times. [...]

Cooking was the other important activity in her life. It was a passion in the same way that poetry was a passion. Something she couldn’t leave alone. Between and along with writing her great poems, Lady Lazarus, Daddy, or Medusa, Sylvia would be thinking on custard or banana bread or buying the lamb for the [...]

Pan con tomate is a familiar menu item in most Spanish restaurants. It is a classic Catalan tapa. It is also one of the recipes included in Manuel Vazquez Montalban’s book, an erudite collection of erotic-gastronomic musings and recipes collected under the unlikely title of Recetas inmorales, ‘Immoral Recipes.’
Rejecting the gastronomic pillars of American imperialism [...]