Ruth Tobias

If you missed it last night, & if you miss it tonight due to the lateness of the hour at which this post will be published, & if your taste in music has always run the knowingly goofy gamut of hyperarticulate misfits from, say, Camper van Beethoven & They Might Be Giants & fIREHOSE to Mates of State & The Decemberists & Flight of the Conchords, like mine has, then you simply mustn’t miss the final screenings of Nerdcore Rising at the Starz FilmCenter tomorrow, Sunday 11/9.

The cinematic equivalent of a fluffernutter—freaky, irresistible, nowhere-but-American—this doc follows MC Frontalot, pioneer of a hip hop subgenre known as nerdcore, on tour with a repertoire of fledgling cult classics like “Crime Spree”—

MC Frontalot: the arch criminal for some reason not

sought by authorities, though I been running wild for days.

They’s surely going to track me down,

I’m the number-1 menace for miles around,

with the littering, the loitering, the mattress tags,

all the pirated Mp3s I grabs

—& “Indier Than Thou”:

I’m so indie that my shirt don’t fit.

You wonder out loud, “Yo, Frontalot, why you come so ill-equipped?”…

I look confused, like I just got out of bed.

My rhyme style reflects this.

Use my overdeveloped sense of irony to deflect dis-

missiles, exploding all around me.

Unpromoted, don’t know how you found me,

soundly situated in obscurityland,

famous in inverse proportion to how cool I am…

You get the idea. They’re Star Wars–worshipping, RPG-mastering, lonely white egghead rappers. The kind who eat Indian takeout every night facing their laptops in pajama bottoms & tees that read “I’m outdoorsy in that I like to get drunk on patios.” Takeout a lot like ours the other night from India’s Pearl.

Granting that basing an assessment of a restaurant on food that has been sitting in plastic in the front seat for awhile is somewhat like assessing a potential love interest when he or she has a ripping hangover & a neck rash, my 2nd experience with this place was satisfactory indeed, only slightly less so than the 1st.

Granting, too, that looking back at the photos I can now only make a half-educated guess as to which dish was which,

chicken tikka masala?

paneer makhani?

lamb vindaloo, I’m pretty sure

I can assure they were all rich & tasty; while I’ve delved into the vindaloo previously, I’ll add that the paneer balanced well its slightly salty cheese cubes with its slightly sweet (indeed sweetened, traditionally with honey I believe) tomato sauce, & that the tikka masala wasn’t rote, what with generous chunks of chicken & the gentlest kick.

The vegetarian biryani, meanwhile, was the guilty greasy pleasure that any dish whose name apparently derives from the Persian word for “fried” should be—& more than just scattered with onions, peppers, peas, nuts & raisins, contrary to the blurry image.

Finally, though the shrimp-&-potato tikki were a bit worse for the lukewarm wear by the time I got hold of them, they had too much integrity to morph into flavorless lumps before my teeth. It’s as though they were leftovers to start with. & that’s no bad thing.