Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Dorothy L. Sayers said that "telling one's dreams is the last word in egotism," but so is quoting from your own email. Don't care, gonna do it anyhow since I like putting my moments of confusion under glass as they crystallize; plus I just want to say hi to the person I said it to (hi, snooks): "Dating's tricky. It's part squeaky wheel and part Catherine Deneuve, sitting there being beautiful. Never know which to do."

Monday, January 29, 2007

Technicolor yawn

Not every Beck song is good. NOT EVERY BECK SONG IS GOOD.

I feel like shit. Flu. *@#&$(&;^#(*&$%)(*& asscrap.

So what do you do when you're up late with chills, fever & nausea? (I just spelled that "nauseau," which has an entirely different feel--nomenclature for a particularly barf-inducing variety of hand-held cinema verite, maybe.) Watch the Umbrellas of Cherbourg, of course. Then the abridged 2-hr (!) Julie Taymor version of the Magic Flute that I've been waiting to see, about which I have nothing intelligent to say at the moment except that Cherbourg seemed more honest. My mom called it the "McMagic Flute" and I think she's right. The staging didn't seem to particularly respect the fact that people were singing. It was more a musical version of an opera than a Taymor version of an opera, it felt like. Must see when I'm not urpy and cranky.

(From the PBS description of the program: "...sung in English by an attractive young cast..." Unh-huh.)

- - - - - - -

Up late bored and chatting with a very polite young man from Madrid last week. Two sentences he carefully typed that really cracked me up:

* "The nickname stucked."
* "...those such that an Emo would wear." (about his new glasses)

- - - - - - -

Okay, gotta crack my mistress of the obvious whip and note that Ricky Gervais is just a genius for pushing shit so far, for being so horrible, so smarmy and grasping and insecure and sweaty and horrid. It's all in the delivery, though. When you look at David Brent quotes they don't have the same ability to make me bark out loud that just watching him does. Gareth's do, though:

"I've just got a complaint from a very important client saying that the figures I gave him were wrong, and . . . yeah, well, basically I've checked all other possibilities and it's come down to the calculator. Well, I don't know, circuitry?"

- - - - - - - -

Live at the Apollo is always and forever great, but I am still a sucker for Sex Machine, Live in Augusta, GA. Think it's as good.

Sunday, January 28, 2007

5:10 of bougey drama

I decided a really nice thing to do with $.99 of the lovely iTunes card I got as a pressie for Christmas would be to finally own a copy of "Zadok the Priest," because who doesn't need to feel like you do when you're listening to that sometimes? Get yourself charged up. But--it turns out--which to buy? Kings College Cambridge? Tallis singers? St. Martin-in-the-Fields? London Phil? Westminster Abbey? Academy of Ancient Music? Herb Alpert? Pharrell? Who has the best feel for it? It was hilarious--I think I listened to maybe twelve 30 second samples of the opening arpeggios (?whatever) trying to decide. Who does the best job? The main thing you get out of comparing like that is tempo.

The thing is, it IS a tricky piece of music in some ways. No resolution could ever be as satisfying a the build-up of that piece--including the resolution Handel wrote--so you want a version that gets as much out of it as it can. And if they don't come in just right on that first ZAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYddddoOKKKKKKK, there's no point. So iTunesing it is still a gamble--don't get the payoff til late.

What I didn't know is that this is a big soccer anthem! Which makes a huge amount of sense, because it really is like Handel + a monster truck rally.

I didn't get that version though (London Festival Orch). I went with the Last Night of the Proms version by the BBC Concert Orchestra. I figured there's a place where they really have to deliver, right? All those drunk listeners wound up into a patriotic frenzy. Can't drop the ball there. It is good, nicely crisp--albeit almost too speedy. The shortest version, next to the Prague Phil. The longest? One of the King's College Cambridge versions.

And all the people rejoiced!

Snaps.

I would like to take this moment to give major props to one of my all-time favorite actresses, Agnes Moorehead, and I'm tired of these two immediate follow-ups to her name: 1) Bewitched--I barely saw it, just please forget it for the moment and 2) the phrase "character actress." Forget both. The fabulous war weepie Since You Went Away is on, but the bit that still stands out? Moorehead as the deliciously horrid (during the war! even) Emily Hawkins. She just pierces every movie she's in with her human, sometimes horrible, off-kilter, sometimes downright seditious performances. I wish I had found a photo of her in Dark Passage with all the leopard skin, I love her in that. Among all the other appeal there is something deliciously modern about her--I don't know if it's because she was free of Hollywood affect from the time, so her cadence and rhythm stands out from all the breathless studio-trained delivery or if she was just so good it was all moot. Somehow she was free from some of the constraints that others seemed bound by. She also managed to portray sexual desire in a way women didn't then: she looked people right in the eye. And has anybody ever made a more amazing film debut (CK), in a more amazingly famous long shot? Although: I love her more in Magnificent Ambersons--that vulnerable performance is almost too painful to watch. She was willing to go too far--not in a campy way--and it's hard not to love her for that. She portrayed people that were just awful with total commitment. It's not that simple, she wasn't that simple, but she went there. TCM's bio says: "...although Moorehead never starred, she often outshone the box office 'names' with her sly, intelligent performances." There probably is mollyhaskell stuff (haven't read; or have forgotten) to say about how she fit into what Hollywood women were allowed to be then and the machine around her, her collective film identity, but for the moment I'm just talking about her. Her eyebrows say it all.
Do it. It may be love or war or mopping up the floor, but just do it.
(from Bells Are Ringing)

Lucille LeSueur

1. I actually got to say "Don't fuck with me fellas" (as in "it ain't my first time at the rodeo") at an appropriate time today. Well, okay, in my head. But it popped to the front of my brain with a really satisfying CLUCK at just the right time. My whole life is a series of l'esprit[s] de l'escalier, over and over, so it felt good. Gotta hit that 'fuck' hard (for the meter, I mean). 'Don't FUCK with me, fellas...'

This is a phrase that has popped up a few times since I turned 40 and had to suffer the exuberant idiocies of people much younger. Bless them.

2. Thanks to DC for a copy of Kool Moe Dee's "I Go to Work"...yay!! YAY! So gud.

3. Catch Me If You Can on TV tonight, the only spiebergian film I really like. Some virtues: incredible atmosphere (the sunny morning in Miami with rain on the ground is genius...never see that in movies), although as usual I don't know if we should be thanking SS or Columbia College's own Janusz K & the hard-working art directors, the character-role performance by Hanks, the odd, cool way it dives into the 60s and 70s, the pacing (no time for huge tearful hoo-hah--okay, some, but it's handled pretty well), SS casting that actually works (Spielberg has a very good eye for culling great talent then putting them in crap), the father-son thing with Frank & Carl is pretty cool. Plus I love anything with paper and inks and printing--total sucker. Like the detail.

Friday, January 26, 2007

net•flix•stall•out (n. - sometimes "netflix-bottleneck"): When for some reason you haven't - couldn't - can't - won't - watch the movie you currently have in front of you from Netflix, but won't return it either and unblock the flow to the next. (I know I wanna see this, is this my last chance to see this? why aren't I watching this? I should watch this.) See also usury; how American companies make money; dumb.

Mr. Sprinkles

One of the best presents I ever got was a container of chocolate jimmies from HY. A restaurant supply container. For those of us who like jimmies, the goofy lil Betty Crocker 1.75 oz jars just don't make any sense. That's like...a jimmies amuse bouche. A shot at the bar. Not to mention they are all wax. This was a big ginormous tub! That lasted a surprisingly short time.

I don't know what it is about jimmies...I just love them and this goes far beyond the kind of nostalgie de la boue crappy-fuds-from-childhood tip. Love em.

This brand rocks. It's Dutch, and made from good chocolate. Plus it comes in this FANTASTIC CONTAINER. I wish to have an entire apartment full of them, rolling gently in the currents from the central heating. (Isn't that image just *begging* to have a text wraparound? It's killing me to have this flat edge.)

Thursday, January 25, 2007

In a perfect laundry world? (after getting my own front-loaders in my apt, of course?) An airing cupboard. Big one. Clothes are not just dirty or clean. There is a transitional state. Need place for the transitional state.
Interestin' article in Slate. Not entirely unrelated to the item below.

Monday, January 22, 2007

I don't know the whole layout of the film, obviously, but I finally decided to face the preview for Norbit and it just made me heartsick. Horrible. Every tired, mean, fathatin, womanhatin, blackwomanhatin, ain't-it-hilarious, fat women are big balls of sloppy nasty clueless sexual need whose desires are gross and unreturnable, dumb, stupid, cheap, humiliating, mean-spirited, soul-killing, narrah, pinched, heart-hearting cliche and then some.

What the FUCK is up with people and fucking fat suits? (Or in this case, "fat suits"--I think there's CGI at work with a fat woman in a bikini & Eddie Murphy's head. Would know more if I could get the movie feature loaded.) What is up with the fact that they are so often used for people to "be" fat black women these days? What the fuck is wrong with Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy? Part of why this sucks is that EMurphy is a good actor and is funny and you want to like this. Another horrible part is that on the red carpet they give these lame props, like heyyyy we're down with y'all, but it's just bullshit. There is this (dunno how else to think of it) bad racist component to all the fatsuit hilarity...taking a certain stereotype and making it even more deep-grooved and less human.

One of the worst things about all this in general? There are very few fat people on the silver screen. And when there are? They are this, fake fat people, they are fucking fat suits. The Bust or Bitch article I fergit that called them the new minstrel show was dead-on. Not only are you not gonna be heard, we're gonna play you for you and make it clear just what you are. Bully mentality.

If I had to guess (I haven't wanted to find out) there could be some redemption in this movie. I bet it's got squidges of humanity in it, like those stupid fucking Nutty Professor movies where whathisface is the good guy but his fat self is a constant joke. You can see it, even, in the preview. But that just makes the way they're selling it worse, and in the end it's only a matter of degree anyhow. The trailer is one of the worst things I've seen in years.

Hollywood is terrified to look at the fat form, or even a form slightly outside of its chosen Zone. Terrified to bestow its benediction on it, let the camera linger without judgement, let a fat body show up again and again, let others get to know it, let it have and be and need. They refuse to diffuse how they feel about it.

The character's name is Rasputina, by the way. Eddie Murphy plays her. Her body--"body"--body looks quite beautiful to me in many of the preview snips.
While having a brief confab with our film critic today, I thought (designerly) as we chatted (filmily), looking past him to the rows of black, very comprehensive-looking reference books on his shelf, most titled with only the name of a filmmaker...Damn. To be a film critic is to be deeply involved with HELVETICA. No way around it.
Query: How much is modern medicine connected to phaneromaniacal impulses? Get rid of scabs, scales, bits? The sad truth is that a zit does much better left to its own devices most of the time, rather than being prodded. Sometimes seems like medicine should back off too. Let things...slough.

Thank you for humoring this bizarre Monday morning thought.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Oh my gosh, I need to rush out and find something incredibly traditionally "crowded" to do exactly while the Bears game is on. Need to take advantage of the people-suck. But what shall it be?? This is not the time to rush to the cartography room at the Newberry...wouldn't make any difference. Maybe buy a car? Do some downtown construction? This isn't gonna work.

Saturday, January 20, 2007

The first thing that happened when I got up today was that I stepped in a pile of cat vomit.

That confirmed that this was (what I call in my head) a Henry Miller day. Get back in bed wait until the funk passes. Didn't help that I've been a total nocturnal hamster recently either. Oy.

Weekend shout-outs

First of all, happy birthday to Heather!

Secondly, hallo to Sheri and to Laura K., just 'cause. Hi! Happy Saturday!

Music Rehabilitation Program?

I'm trying to decide if I want to Reclaim a goopy emo song I like. I have avoided it like anthrax for three years due to its bad romantic associations--haven't listened to it all the way through once since then-- but the thing I'm discovering is I still have a musical appreciation for it, although it's also still informed somewhat by the goopiness it has. I dunno, can I make it mine, only mine? Send myself/it through a systematic desensitization process so that it is laundered clean from associations? This is the challenge. I feel a bit like tackling it. Or perhaps it's a slide down into a hole! Dunno.

Friday, January 19, 2007

Oh, and the really dorky part?

(see previous post)

So, I have been wandering around crooning "cu-cu-rru-cu-cuuuuu" to myself over and over, and that, naturally, has melted into the chorus of "Take Off" by Bob and Doug McKenzie. "Coo coo coo coo coo COO COO!" Bizarrely similar. Was starting to forget why I was singin it all the time. BWAH HAH. Beauty, eh? Oh I am in the way-back machine.

BWAH hah!

Always with the obvious

A few months ago an internet friend sent me a link to a Caetano Veloso's performance of "Cucurrucucu Paloma" in the Almodovar film, Talk to Her (Hable con ella). In a strange way I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since. It's completely...there has to be a better, less overused word than "hooky" or "ear worm." Or "hypnotic" and "haunting." Let's just say it won't leave my head. I listened to it again this week and it has provided the psychic soundtrack for 4-5 days now. Interesting, too, for as this gringa granda understands from my friend, this is a kind of macho mariachi song, usually sung not so wistfully, like this mexicanidol-y version. Anyhow, you know, delish. What I don't know about Latin music could fill stadiums, although 15 years in Rogers Park guaranteed that I will hear the German-sounding bottom of Tejano in my dreams for a long time...

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Hell on earth: Lifetime TV promos for "Grey's Anatomy" reruns. Gag me.

I am so hyper I want to climb out of skin! Typing...is either throwing carefully carved letter-shaped wood on the fire or big buckets of sand. Can't decide which.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

More Kvelling

Jan 23 is the publication date for an anthology of columns from the "Modern Love" column of the Sunday New York Times called: Modern Love: 50 True and Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit, and Devotion. Mebestpal Skip's is included in the book; her piece, titled "A Go-Between Gets Going," can still be found referenced all over, because it's so FREAKIN GREAT. It makes me cry every time I read it, not to mention burst with nerdly pride. BURST. With PRIDE. Go darling bebe! Look for KIRSTEN ALLEN MAJOR.

Whee!

There are going to be more of these kinds of posts in the future, I know, but I must note that my adorable freudin Professorin Magistra femme fantastico Hanne (Blank) just received a starred review in Publisher's Weekly for her upcoming book Virgin, which I've mentioned here before, I do believe. To quote a few choice bits:

" . . . Blank has no shortage of fascinating facts . . . Blank also has a pleasing, highly readable style that allows her to convey large amounts of information with wit and agility. But she becomes most animated, and political, when she probes contemporary ideas about virginity. Taking on a range of questions--why is virginity considered sexy? how does the idea of virginity fuel violence against women?--she makes the case that contemporary culture is as obsessed with, and benighted about, virginity, as those of the past. Thoroughly researched, carefully argued and written with a sly sense of humor, this is a bright addition to the popular literature of women's and cultural studies."

court transcript 298Hj872345-A9287ko

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 17 A.D. 2007

The accused stand before you:

- URSULA HOLEPUNCH ENTROPINATRIX CHUBSTER HOTTER SEALCUB BEARCUB BRRRRAP TAMNY, hereafter known as URSULA
and
- HERMIONE POLLY DACTYL COTTONBALL POPTOGETHER HEADBONK HAIRNIBBLER PERFIDIA TAMNY, hereafter known as HERMIONE

Accused of the most grievous and heinous crimes of laundry molestation.

The laundry tribunal here collected states before God and all:

WHEREAS

The crime of illegal occupation--known commonly within law-enforcement communities as "squatting"--of the laundry basket of Elizabeth M. Tamny ("the humanplaintiff"), despite repeated requests to vacate the premises, cease and desist letters, restraining orders from local and federal authorities; a crime repeated with insouciant disdain, indeed in this case a certain determined habituation flying in the face of the owner's desires--is a most devastating and increasingly upsetting phenomenon for the humanplaintiff.

WHEREAS

The results of said "squatting" are almost as distressing to our plaintiffhuman as the misguided illegal occupation itself; that is, the seemingly impossibly complex weaving of the hairs of the forementioned accused, URSULA and HERMIONE, into the variety of fabrics appearing in the laundry of the humanplaintiff, which require extreme, impossibly vigorous laundering to remove; in fact, laundry technology and skill in many ways unequal to the task at hand and in fact highlighting the extreme nature of the nassy pernicious hair invasion. It just don't get out. Even with many spins of the dryer, that is to say, many hard-won quarters of the plaintiffhuman dropped into the dryer at great inconvenience for harsh dessicating air that does little but weave the encroaching hairs more tightly into the violated fabrics.

THEREFORE

We conclude that due to the hideous, irredeemable nature of these crimes, and the accused's distinct lack of interest in both rehabilitation or apology for their repeated affronts, we ask that a penalty of no less than FIVE YEARS in JUVENILE FELINE DETENTION be imposed; furthermore, that at least THREE of those years be spent in pursuit of advanced laundry techniques and be proven so in no less than TWO written tests, ONE on-site demonstration of technique, as well as a court-supervised letter of apology to the humanplaintiff. At this time, if the plaintiffhuman agrees, supervised temporary visits may be allowed, but only up to and as such time as it is agreed the proper remorse and commitment to recovery is demonstrated.

May god have mercy on your last-nerve-workin fur-flyin souls.

Ask and ye shall... Well, turns out there is a new boxed set of Doris Day films coming out, a bunch of early Warner's musicals including Romance on the High Seas. Whee!

Monday, January 15, 2007

I don't like working on MLK Day, I wish at least it was a holiday that required work to shift around to it. It's the only federal holiday honoring someone who's something to do with my lifetime and it feels a little weird to work. V103 was playing an interesting history of him with excerpts of speeches this a.m. that was makin me bawl. Fascinating but sad.

Sunday, January 14, 2007

It is an opaque lake day here by the shores of Lake Michigan. Opaque, rough and grey-brown, the surface of the water roughed as the top of shepherd's pie is with a fork. Yes, yes it is.

Friday, January 12, 2007

New (to me) way to experience strangeness through the Internet: reminders from Friendster about a birthday for someone who's now dead. Not too ghoulish.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Things.

HAH.
One reason I love my friend Ali: When confronted with a version of myself bubbling over with nameless formless terribly exciting personal growth of a totally internal nature, her words: "Quit being cryptic or I'll kick your ass." My bebe!

SUGAR.
I am very very grateful for my friends these days, for loving me, letting me love them, hanging in with each other midst so much, showing me their beauty: S (KAM), HB, HAY, AR, DTC, tout.

SUCCESS.
Diorissmo has returned! After a redesign hiatus, Christian Dior is again making the girly-girl perfume of my dreams. I got it in the mail today and it smells just like it used to! It even has a chic new bottle I like, although I also liked the old herringbone-patterned label. I really like this perfume, it makes me feel good to wear it. Worth every penny. I bought a passel of other girly stuff too, including Violetta di Parma and Caswell & Massey flower stuff and I am just jazzed. Must be a goofy neologism for the way that people are certain smells, the way certain smells twang your deepest strings, the way you are certain colors (like a winter). In which case I would probably be classified as a Miss Deb 1959, but I dun't care. This stuff fits my olifactory receptors.

MORE OBSCURITY.
I've been processing things like a lesbian recently, and very happy as the results have felt real and less like hopeful wheel-spinning. They are not New Things, these thoughts, for like every important revelation in my life, it's something I knew already; I ran miles and miles of well-considered thought to get to DUH. But I don't care. I got here. Being precocious is not a gift. Tedious Fucking Drama of the Gifted Fucking Child! That's not what I mean, but that's what I want to say.

BRAGGING.
A fav cousin was just made Dean of the College at Williams. Go Karen!

ARCHITECTURE AND RELIGION.
I need to write more about the church I went to for Christmas, which, had I attended in my youth, I know would have resulted in a career in wallpaper design, for it is covered in Victorian Gothic stenciling that I just can't stop scanning when I'm there, over and over. It's like the way the Book of Common Prayer crept into G. Herbert's poetry; I know I would have done huge paintings later, not necessarily realizing where the patterns came from.

The church, which is actually pre-Chicago fire, is hanging on in the middle of terrifying skyscraper-building on every side; the building across the street is huge and comes RIGHTUP to the curb, hitting on the church like a big dude macckin on a girl at a party. And this image on the left is of another planned building to go up right beside it. Um...can you spot the church in this photo? Not sure I can. What oh what is being worshipped?

Monday, January 08, 2007

* I am bubbling over with minutiae, awash with the urgency of the unimportant. Mostly scribbled notes from watching TCM the last 2/3 weeks.

* I am also bawling my way through the end of West Side Story for the 600th time. I was struck (7% of my brain) this time by--while excruciating when it happens--what a good plot point it is that Anita is the one who tells the Jets to tell Tony Maria is dead. Like...it's better than Shakespeare, yo. Makes more emotional sense than the vagaries of a friar's poison. There is such music in some of the ending dialogue (not just lyrics), esp. the "How many bullets, Chino" line. Golly. Bawl bawl. And the scene at the gym...Russ Tamblyn's just the most chic dapper dude, ever. Love watching him tumble in his tie.

* Speaking of very emotional Bernstein music that my parents, while the ones who introduced me to the stuff would still find me a sap for still seeking it out, I have decided I have to own a copy of Mass. Dopey and cheezball but very beautiful musically despite itself. I have been reading up on the recordings and there's really only one since the one I grew up on, the one with Alan Titus as the celebrant (oh BOY are people attached to him in that role...tis interesting--and me too). You could say this piece of music didn't age well, or dates itself too much--but you can't. It's still there.

* My lipstick drawer is a sea of bad 90s choices of bright, Paloma Picasso reds (I mean, in addition to the awful free-when-you-buy detritus) that should have been exactly medium Marilyn red but ending up being on my skin....ORANGE. I feel grateful to know what I have to do now to achieve that red, what looks good, and yet I don't throw the others away. Why? They are a weird map. And if I melted them all down...you know it wouldn't be a majick thing. Just kinda bleh.

* I'm back on The Gilmore Girls. I'm gonna ride it out, if nothing else. I think I took this break, really (without realizing) to stretch and rest up for what promises to be a trying end of season.

* Holly Hunter is the female Richard Dreyfuss of her generation. She is almost unbearably annoying in films like Broadcast News, no matter what she does. Just...annoying.

* Doris Day's big word: "marvelous." BTW, I finally saw Down With Love, and there is something Bubbling. If nothing else, a way to describe what I like about DD, which is an almost impossible thing to pin down.

* TCM's "The Essentials": much better with Molly Haskell now too. She's great.

* I discovered 10 seconds of The Runaway Bride I liked.

* The Marx Bros. marathon on TCM was incredibly fun. I found myself enjoying Horse Feathers more than I expected, esp. the songs. Also got to hear one of my fav Marx lines in Night at the Opera (next to ""Your eyes, your eyes, they shine like the pants of a blue serge suit" from Cocoanuts): [to a guy dressed as Pagliacci] "Can you sleep on your stomach with such big buttons on your pajamas?"

* The Frontline narrator is doing commercial voiceovers. (!) For a car or something. (!!) I dunno if he's done it before, but I was shocked as hell. As my friend JJWF used to say, there's something about him that would make you believe anything he said.

* The worst thing about Friends other than...Friends? Their horrible "titles." "The One Where Ross [whatevers]." It fits, but it's awful.

Lay him down!

Wisdom from Tammy Faye Bakker:

"And I'm going to say one thing. I know a lot of us have been hurt. I have been hurt horribly. And it's a hard time sometimes to forgive people. And I want to tell you, in ancient civilization, if you killed somebody, instead of putting you in a jail, like they do nowadays, you know what they did? They took that dead person and they strapped that dead person on your back. And you know what ended up happening? The dead person ended up killing the person that was carrying him.

I had a dead person on my back for a long time, and I carried that man on my back until one day, I heard a voice inside me say, Tammy, lay him down. Just lay him down. I'll take care of him. And one day, I unstrapped that dead body from my back. I laid that body down and I said, God, he's not a part of me anymore, and I live. Lay him down! Let him go and move on! "

Montag and the living is easy

Improvised marinade actually very successful. Must elaborate.

Marinade:
- the juice of 2 Christmas tangerines
- leftover container of blackberry conserves for samosa
- dried thyme, oregano, lots of ground pepper
- dry mustard
- balsamic vinegar
- olive oil
- Worchestershire sauce

Throw six frozen chicken breasts in marinade in plastic bag, let thaw/marinate for too long (two days). Bake in oven at 350 with marinade, basting, until done. Remove chicken breasts, strain marinade into saute pan and reduce fiercely. Shred two chicken breasts, add to mixture along with knoblet of butter at end and squeeze of Blaze balsamic glaze you forgot you had lying around. Cook penne rigat until seriously not quite done, toss in pan with chicken and sauce, then serve with stirs of parmeggiano. Good!

**

Nobody's Oprah here, nobody's Gayle. Nuh-unh.

**

Mysterious rant of the day: there is nothing particularly kind or evolved or mature or thought-out about the phenomena of friendswithbenefits. Have an affaire, have a lover, but the drawn-out twilight world of the half-committed...it's unkind, unnatural, mean. Not the scale of the human heart, or if so, rarely the scale of two. This is my feeling, and I'm sticking to it.

Friday, January 05, 2007

It was a nice dreamy dark city night ride home tonight. I got to watch my favorite chubby urban Corgi in the whole world scamper around the park while I waited for the trolley (name withheld to protect any Corgis who recognize fellow doggies online) then while tootling down the street the driver (listening to V103) was blasting "Moments in Love" by Art of Noise, making for a very atmospheric ride. That song, I'm happy to say, has found a permanent home here on Urban Contemporary radio, sometimes quietstormystuff eh, but also stepping sets.

Speaking of radio! As someone who spent 15 solid years listening to WGCI, I am excited to see YouTube filling in more and more of the radio variations on songs/more hard-to-find R&B songs I can't find. Like...heheh...the Heavy D remix of "Candy Rain"--gawd, I love that song (gotta be the remix tho). And scenes from House Party (hard to find the soundtrack these days--and I like the movie version of "Ain't My Type of Hype" by Full Force better than the album version). And the mix of "Ladies First" (Monie Love/Queen Latifah) with the sung chorus, which is not in the version I have (forget which is the radio edit). And the Michael Jackson/SWV mix of "Right Here" which must have copyright restrictions cause like all these you can't buy them on iTunes. And "Keep Ya Head Up" by Tupac which I guess Sug Knight owns or something.

Heavy D is currently high on my list of underrated folks, as is Steve Miller Band for some reason--in that hiding in plain sight way. HD could really *move* and I love that he's so bass-happy. Thrills me to my core.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Success: a wildly improvised marinade for chicken that incorporated leftover blackberry conserves from takeout samosa from Indian Garden and two tangerines leftover from Christmas. Too bad you can never really recreate these things later.
A possibility: writers have no memory? (Rather than too much) So they make up their own stories. I was trying to remember this funny thing somebody said to me once in 2002 and couldn't begin to dredge it up (I have terrible recall for dialogue). This wouldn't be so weird if 1) I hadn't repeated it to a bunch of people at the time 2) I wasn't watching a bunch of fat women in a fashion show waving American flags at the time, not quite my everyday activity.

I really do love astrology sometimes, the Brezny horoscopes. Soothing.

I think I would have MySpaced by now (I was one of the Friendster folk a few years ago) except that, gawd! The pages! The WORST design I've ever seen--they look like the awful amateur pages from 8 years ago, full of computer-crashing graphics and sudden music like the awful midi files of yore. Is this like the VSH/Beta thing? Beta was better, VHS became ascendant. Friendster's a million times better designed, but it doesn't matter, MySpace seems to have won.

I really hate dealing with garbage, garbage spills, what Homer Simpson calls Garbage Juice. I am seriously thinking about getting married to have someone to take out the trash. I hate to lock anybody into gender stereotypes like that, but I'll do it. I am great at collecting garbage, making sure it's all collected and ready to go, but gawd do I hate to take out the trash.

10,000 things to write about here that have been piling up. Rather than trying to clear a huge blockage all at once, I'm going to more sanely try to just write more consistently and just push things in as I feel like it. I mean--the world needs to hear what I think about polar bears, right? And Audra MacDonald? And crab cakes? The world is waiting for this.

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

wild

How did I never hear the Mamas and the Papas version of "Glad to Be Unhappy"? Wild! I'm most familiar with the Sinatra mopping-up interpretation from Wee Small Hours--how funny to hear their take on such an American songbook standard. Pretty cool.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

16,000+ Iraqis dead in 2006.