by Alex Kapranos
Love is when someone can wade through a stack of media, much of which is the kind of crap that led you to discount the whole pile, and identify the one gem worth caring about. Double heart points if the media in question is totally out of that someone's interests. I get a surprising number of books and video games that way, through my husband. Great man.
Sound Bites was another Asheville find. The Guardian paid Kapranos, front man for Franz Ferdinand, to write about all the exotic foods he and his band ate while on tour. I'd always suspected that, at that rate of travel, even the most gustatory minded would end up eating a lot of junk. In Kapranos's case, junk = Subway. It's not always satisfying to be right.
Amidst the subs and cold pizza, though, they did actually manage some interesting food, or at the very least, some interesting venues. The book is written as a series of vignettes and is often less about the food and more about the places and people. I particularly found his recounting of a place called 'Ninja' in Osaka and a rather petty incident in Singapore hilarious. The only time he mentioned Atlanta was a sideways reference to the Sundial Cafe, a rotating restaurant at the top of a skyscraper downtown. He hated it as much as I did for its massively overpriced and wretched food. See previous comment about the problematic nature of being right.
Kapranos has a lively voice, an adventurous palette, and excellent background knowledge as a former cook. It was a fun read, but not the height of literature.
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