bougey musings about forks and wangs

Dee Snider & Anthony Bourdain...startin to look a lil alike, ifyouaskme.

I liked Shortbus. Was I not supposed to? Twarn't perfect, but it had that thing that I loved best about Hedwig--a really emotionally sophisticated sense of humor, snarky and delicious, faster than the viewer. I think its companion large-scale moments of swooning drama were less well-defended than H (oy, the crying hotties), but still. Funny! And such a relief to see wang on the American screen. And, of course, a shot of a naked fat body seemingly involved in the pursuit of pleasure, although it was hella brief and sorta...swept off the screen a little bit, it felt.

Speakin o Wang, how did I manage to not hear about the nawtynekkid AB photo for My Last Supper? Like Marcus Samuelsson and the blender.

The concept for the Bourdain book sent me back to look at the Roald Dahl cookbook (Memories With Food) me darling Hanne gave me, where RD did the same thing with a few writers (a lot of books have done this; AB's asks the last supper question specifically of chefs). Very interesting answers, especially PDJames, and why did I know hers would involve duck with sage and onion stuffing and peas. (I hadn't looked at this book, which has some interesting English and Norwegian recipes and was written by RD and his last wife, since I learned more about how he left Patricia Neal for her...feels odd. *gossipy literary spasm*) Speakin o Hanne, she sent me an adorable lil letterpress book with cook-ish quotations in it recently, one that's raising the tone around my keyboard considerably as I thumb through it. My favs so far are very conservative quotes from Julia Child about doing the classics right and a funny simplistic lil quote from Paul Prud'homme: "Food is best just when it's cooked, at that point there's nothing else you can do to it to make it better."

It kinda makes sense; I am in a weirdly Catholic--reactionary--conventional--those would be the negative terms--phase about food and its doings these days. I'm craving...the best from the past? The things you can't count on anymore? My excitement centers around the classical French repertoire (I don't care if I ever see/read/hear about a "new twist" on anything again--show me how to make pate a choux! again! and again!) and silverware with the right heft and tine spaceage and it's like I'm turning into the stuffy old gouty lawyer I will be in my dotage with the skimpy but respectable wine cellar and little stool covered in Oriental needlework for my foot. Some of it is what DL Sayers calls the "new delight in formality" as one gets older, but I am just craving...substance. Longer meals at the table. Beautiful little meals, thoughtfully served, china and glass that...is as sensual too. I feel kinda silly talking about all this--more than a little silly, it's all so bourgeois and consumerist at its core, and the sad result of too many English novels, but still, I long for delicious pretty things with this weird fierce intensity. It's not like I didn't live off a pot of chili I all weekend that I microwaved in batches, and why not, it fuckin rocked--I'm not actually sitting down after dinner with a mother of pearl fruit knife and a perfectly ripe hothouse peach that I carefully peel on a Crown Derby plate--but the point is...it sounds nice. And why not sometimes. And I can tell you more about fruit knives than I used to after this all surged anew with an idle thought about silver ice cream forks and ice tea straws a few months ago, help.

Now I feel kinda naked, naked as AB, sayin all that. Especially because I'm really not sure what I'm saying. I'm admitting to a fantasy of sorts, which is always embarrassing, only it isn't that simple.

Speaking of all this...look at this bizarro fork (from a set) I got recently. I haven't run a test on the handle to see if it's Bakelite yet, but I can't for the life of me figure out quite what it is or even if it's old or new, and I'm usually pretty good at that. It seems like an oyster fork with the three tines and the slight flare to them, but the tines are really long. They are also strangely sharp and thick. The whole fork is much smaller scale than a dinner fork or even a salad fork. The most likely bet seems a cocktail fork, but still, how odd, and what the metal is I really don't know yet.