Salon.com > Sumana Harihareswara

Dub masters

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 21:07:00 +0000

"Uncle Morty's Dub Shack," which just finished its first season on the ImaginAsian cable network, is the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" of bad Asian films, and like its predecessor with the then-unknown Comedy Central, it could help put the obscure iaTV on the map. The conceit of the show is that four loser friends -- Trevor, Aladdin, Jimbo and John -- earn a little extra cash dubbing martial arts, action and Bollywood films into English at the Dub Shack, run by an old crank named Morty. Uncle Morty doesn't have the translated scripts, so the friends turn the movie scenes into sketch comedy. For those of us who didn't warm to MST3K, "Uncle Morty's" is easier to love, because it's only half an hour long (the films are significantly, and mercifully, edited down), and the writers create believable alternate narratives for the flicks instead of merely smirking at them.

For example, in "Blowback 2," a 1991 Japanese action film, a wannabe vigilante completely botches his revenge fantasy. The dubbers play the scene for laughs but keep the story going:

Jump on the veggie express!

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 16:13:00 +0000

I hate to drive. My boyfriend does, too. But he loves to cook, so for years we schlepped to Trader Joe's, Whole Foods and farmers markets to get locally grown, seasonal, organic produce. Then, two years ago, I heard about Planet Organics, a San Francisco-based service that delivers fresh, organic produce to your door. Now we're never out of veggies and we spend much less time in endless checkout lines.

Home delivery has made cooking with organic vegetables fun and convenient. We can leave it up to the produce pickers at Planet Organics to choose what we will eat each week -- they've surprised us with delicious beets, plums and green beans, all things we never would have ordered on our own -- or we can handpick our own bounty. The Web site allows us to preemptively refuse things we hate, so we're never stuck with persimmons or green peppers. And we can customize our deliveries to include all-natural meats, prepared meals and even some sundries like shampoo and deodorant. But the best part? Planet Organics is bonded to handle house keys, so it can deliver to our house even when we're not there!

TV chefs that don’t bite

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 21:00:00 +0000

My mom served up boiled sweet potatoes, seasoned only with salt and pepper, this Thanksgiving. My boyfriend might have done the same, last year. But for our own intimate Thanksgiving dinner for two this year, Leonard expertly braised his sweet potatoes in butter, cream and sugar, yielding yams so perfect I gobbled them down with embarrassing zeal.

As Leonard gets to be a better and better cook, I find myself inviting people over to his house for dinner, and last month I finally stopped trying to convince myself that my jeans had just shrunk in the wash.

How did my engineer boyfriend learn to cook so well? Certainly not from watching the food shows the cable TV channels dish up in abundance. The personality-driven recipe files of Emeril Lagasse, Nigella Lawson, Rachael Ray, Jamie Oliver, even Jacques Pepin entertain us, but they don't teach us much cooking. And "Iron Chef"? That's just a neo-feudalistic game show that happens to involve food.

I am Indian. I am American. I do customer support.

Wed, 10 Mar 2004 20:30:00 +0000

"Are you in India now?"

I silently held the phone for a moment, not knowing what to say. I am Salon's customer support representative. The customer had put my name and my title together and asked the logical, if awkward, question.

"No, I'm in San Francisco," I answered tentatively.

"Same difference," he blustered.

My gig at Salon entails much e-mailing and a bit of phoning, helping people subscribe and renew and retrieve lost passwords, and copying and pasting paragraphs from the FAQ. In other words, I work from a cubicle in San Francisco, but I could easily telecommute from Omaha -- or Bombay. A few subscribers have tentatively mentioned that I have a beautiful name, or that they loved "Bend It Like Beckham," but this was the first caller to call me out on the absurdity of my position. An American-born Indian doing call-center work in California?

After that, I heard a story from my equally brown sister. Nandini related that, upon hearing her loud American voice in a Bangalore pub, a call-center representative had complimented her accent and offered her a job. Even better: The headhunter didn't give up until my cousin spoke up, informing the interloper that he himself answered phones for Dell and could get Nandini a far better gig than one at some no-name Indian firm.

“Star Trek’s” new moral frontier

Wed, 10 Sep 2003 20:00:00 +0000

"Star Trek" fans will have a new reason to sigh in relief on Wednesday night as "Enterprise" returns for its third season, ready to prove all over again that it is not "Star Trek: Voyager." The fourth Trek series, which ended in 2001, was a tired debacle in my eyes, and those of most "Star Trek" fans. Its creators seemed to think they could re-create the magic of "Next Generation" or the mood of "Deep Space Nine" by reusing their stories and adding gimmickry and Big Bangs.

"Enterprise" doesn't have a gimmick. It has a premise, an interesting question to answer: How did humanity go from the bottom to the top of the galactic totem pole? What happened between the era of "Enterprise," in the 22nd century, and the time of the original 1960s "Star Trek" series, featuring Kirk and Spock, some 115 years later? Why and how did humans rise to equal status with other spacefaring species?