Monday, September 29, 2008

Phood Phollies

So...back for the moment to "the trivial round, the common task," as Barbara Pym was fond of quoting (J. Keble). The Dow's dropped 700 points and I need to organize/regroup my thoughts about feeding myself in this economy.

I had a brief respite recently from relentless home-cooking due to a roadtrip, so I found myself when I returned totally out of the groove, to the point where I forgot I was getting groceries delivered the day I returned (a day late) and found them piled, sweating slightly, in front of my door. New groceries didn't help, either, because I had shopped so carefully with such an eye toward cooking/the future, that there was very little I could just...eat. So I pillaged my LU petit ecolier biscuits and moaned about having nothing to eat the rest of the time until I'd occasionally break down and get delivery.

[The ultimate urban delivery idiocy? This past Sat night I broke down and ordered dogs from Portillo's ohhhhhh yeah! only to discover as I got more and more impatient that the delivery time on my receipt was 12 PM not AM...I had ordered dogs for Sunday lunch. Ridiculous.]

I'm back though. I found myself in the very unAmerican position of having no bread at all in the house. 19,000 other starches, but no bread. So I made bread, and am now marinating a flank steak from the very back of the freezer and preparing some lentils for bacon, lentil & potato soup. I feel a little overwhelmed, but determined.

The bread is left: I found the simplest recipe for cornbread I could find, using some of the nice organic cornmeal that's been-let's say--maturing in my freezer forever, plus some buttermilk I bought in the last groceries go-round with an eye toward cornmeal activity. It tastes pretty good, but I think I really need to something to sop it in. Will probably defrost some chicken chili, although I also have a ham steak I've been planning to work into 2-3 meals this week. But I need some soppin'.

Someone I know recently mentioned cooking pasta e fagiole, which seemed so terribly apropos, economy-wise. [Thinking about LaGuardia, I mean; I was trying to picture Richard Daley encouraging us to cook colcannon or soda bread in these trying times.] I love pasta e fagiole...mmmm yum. With white beans and some bacon in the mix if possible. I think this lentil soup will scratch that desire for beany porridge, and the cornbread will be great with it. The steak I will marinate for 24 hrs (marinade is a fun experiment involving vinegars and lime and most of the refrigerator door) then just sear up and use it for whatever--sammchs, with eggs, in tacos. This'll work out. The only real question at the moment is, as ever--can I keep up with the dishes.
I turned away from my computer for a scant 3-4 hours, only to find once back that in the interim my old employer's just gone belly-up. Chapter 11.

It's the latest boom in an endless series of bad news, but I am still having a reaction. A slow and confused one, staring (simultaneously) at a news photo of a protester of the bail-out with a sign that says, "Save people, not banks." It's always been complicated, how my old newspaper is dying, what was bigger than it or not, what was industry/personality, how to untweeze the web directive/fall-back/meaninglessness from it all, but that just makes me feel (now, still)...thick. Confused. Slow. I'm sad. And I wish somebody would tell a little more of the truth. I don't feel like I have the whole story, ever. I can't tell what I'm not hearing.

Oh! The bail-out just failed in the House. Okay, the moral here? Never leave your computer. Or--wait--always leave your computer.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

paulnewman

Sigh, well, what to say or add to the fray, except that I liked him, a lot.

I know I saw Hud in college (it was around then that the line "Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire" crept into my understanding of the world), but I'm pretty sure I saw it on my own, accidentally, at home on TV or something, not as part of film classes or the film society, partly because I can still almost recreate the surprise I felt stumbling upon it in my ignorance. The experience resulted, I realized later, in quantum leaps--level jumps--major bumps towards adulthood and understanding I didn't expect. Art, sex, tragedy, female autonomy. Men in jeans. Need, familial pain, evening silence.

That was half due to Patricia Neal as Alma, whose performance is so knowing that it somehow drags you toward worldly wisdom whether you want to go there or not, riding on that unbelievable voice. But the rest was basically due to Newman. I couldn't stop watching him--hoping he'd be onscreen all the time--despite how awful he was. He was amazing. The hooded, coiled quality his body, his eyes had... It was too much. It was such a sexual experience, that film--a confused one, in its mores and morality--but sexy, all the more so because of the beautiful dusty black and white cinematography, which allowed the physical energy to shine through more intensely, like his eyes, which you would know were blue (even if you didn't know) from the way they shone too. His physical beauty in that film was not unimportant nor a detraction from his abilities--there was something about it that confirmed why/how movie stars are important, in the way that some critics say movie stars can never be again since the demise of b&w. The fact that the film was old, period, was part of its power for me, reaching up from the past the way it did. And Newman was a man, even if an awful, conflicted man, not a boy. What can I say, it kicked me in the pants.

I also admired the man--the actor--for insistently, but in a dignified way, demanding that we know what he looked like as he aged, via his public image. He didn't hide it or squirm away, it seems like. I don't know if he was vain or bemoaned aging, but his actions created a cumulative effect I thought was human and honest.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Country-->City

After even just three days in a Very Nice Part of Michigan--the left side of the mitten strewn with happy vacationers--I'm feeling a little re-engineered. Just because. Economic crisis or no. It's the quiet when you turn out the lights, the sound of buzzing insects in the woods, a constantly reappearing view of the lake with nothing in it, around it or blocking it. Blueberry farms, more trees, slow drivers, no computers, no real news even. I'm not camping, I'm not roughing it, I am just out of the city. It's good.

I am even, due to a clear lack of thorough planning on my part, stuck here a day extra, sort of. I should have expected not having a ride back earlier in the day. Only it was much better this way. We got up at leisure, hung with our hosts, went to the world's greatest roadside inn (I could eat fried perch every day), saw S's Aunt C.

Now I am alone in a hotel room with a window overlooking a Wal-Mart and no pool access, ready to take the train back tomorrow, and so tired I can't even crawl from the couch to the bed to watch The Devil Wears Prada, which seems (qv tired) so significant that I should be not missing a word. Only I do, and I don't get up as early as I should, which means that at 8:00 a.m. I am already calling the local cab company in a panic about making the 9:02 Amtrak into the city. I keep getting voice mail, that's it. Quite alarming quality in a cab company.

I dress in between fretful dialings of the cell, and hump my luggage sweatily into the Ramada Inn lobby, feeling rather more like more normal urban self, suddenly: peeved, aggrieved, looking for a cab driver to blame for my trouble. Only I'm also feeling just the merest thread of tee-hee in amongst all the angst. This is a huge pain; there is only one train a day, I honestly don't know what I'm going to do if I don't make it, I can't afford any of this, particularly, but still...tee-hee! Travel! Things out of my control. If I miss the train...I miss the train. It is just me and my suitcases. I love that about travel. For this and for other human reasons, I am reining in a major hissy fit. Something will come through.

It does. I am told out of the blue that a hotel employee is going to drive me to the train station. I am sleepily, fulsomely grateful. She pulls up in her mini van, I put my stuff in the back with her kids' car seats, and off we go up and down the back roads to the train station. She is very nice, and--nicely--not super chatty. She shows me photos of her kids, we talk about whether it's more boring to live Here (pretty/empty), where she does, or There (dirty/full), where I do. Country versus city. Her name is Autumn; her dad calls her to remind her it's the first day of Autumn today.

The air is cool and it feels like autumn even if it doesn't entirely look like it. There are rubbings of red and gold on the edges of the green trees. The fruit farms look somewhat dry and picked-over, it seems like children are swept away into school. There is a slight air of being finished for the season in the signage, in the people heading to work.

Due to Autumn's knowledge of back roads, I am at the train station 10 minutes before it is to arrive. She won't let me help with gas money. It's the most adorable train station in the world, re-fashioned out of a train depot built in the 1920s. There is a cluster of about twenty of us there, including some family members seeing people off, for the 9:02. One family has both a baby and a toy Pomeranian. The dog is smaller than the baby, and when he hops down from his owner's arms--his owner looks like a grizzled old farmer--he totters around on tiny jacked-up back legs like a low rider.

I feel, still, free. My hair is looking more and more like Mrs. Claus', and I feel a little nauseous because I am both in the direct sun and across from a pickle factory, but I don't care. I'm on the road. I'm waiting for the train. The wind's blowing a little, there is a bathroom in the depot if necessary, life is good. Tee-hee.

As it is, we wait two hours for the train. This is for a two and a half hour train ride, mind you. I spend most of the time talking to a lady who has retired to this part of Michigan. She is very Chicago: Greek/Swedish, her husband Polish/Catholic, she knows only the south side, and she once went on a double-date or two with Richard Daley (M.) in high school. "He was a dork--he's still a dork," is the most I can get out of her despite multiple probings, making her giggle and me snort. She tells me she fell "for a Fonzie," instead, and has had 40 years of surprises.

The train's comfy. There isn't even a club car, just a sad little corner of a luggage area where an Amtrak employee is selling snacks, which--still--does a really brisk business. You need your refreshments on the train. The conductors are the real thing. Sort of aloof, sort of Henny Youngman, startlingly in the know. Big. It's too hot on the train, but it's still basically comfortable. Even the bleat of the horn doesn't really annoy. I am ground level with town after town of people who all stop to look as we go by. I am really good at looking out the window. I like looking out the window. I doze off. I am thinking the whole time, when I think: we have to have trains. We have to have newspapers. These are businesses of civilization and should not have any choice attached to their existence. We need them. The civic feelings and larger goals attached to their existence, once the ability to make handfuls of non income-taxed cash melted away, should stand on its own now. What is wrong with reasonable profit? Why is our economy dead? I snore.

I am very lucky off the train in Union Station and get some red-cap help right away with my heavy over-packed luggage via a little cart that I don't really know how to describe. It held four us, not including the driver, despite fitting down only one side of the gangway, next to the pillar. And it had a cart behind us for all our luggage. And it did U-turns. It was full of joints and rotating connectors, but how it really worked is still is a mystery. I don't know how this guy did it, got us all up and down and up and down these tiny narrow spaces. I put my arm around the old woman next to me in her pink cardigan in an odd moment of necessary pseudo-intimacy and whooped like a little kid. It was fun.

I drag my luggage to a cab outside Union Station, where things feel very hot, very loud, very pressing. I give my cab driver my address, shout it the second time. He gets it. Then a woman he's been honking at before, during, and after our exchange, whose car is basically blocking his way out of the taxi rank, rolls down her window and starts yelling at him. "You didn't need to be so rude," she starts, "honking like that," although this is clearly the kind of cab driver who uses his horn constantly, like the letter E. He yells back at her about blocking egress from the cab rank. She gets madder, he gets louder. He opens his door to show her the sign, she gets ready to get out of her seat.

I've been smiling at them sort of spacily as they yell. It is very clear they are both exactly right. He was rude, and she is kind of blocking his way. I can see it all. I am mellow. Everything's clear. We are going to sit there forever. I am happy to be finally home but tired, all of a sudden. One long weekend plus two hours late tired about it all. The cab driver started the meter the second my ass touched the seat, and it is the sudden awareness of this fact that kicks me into gear, makes me realize the tee-hees are not relevant. Gotta be in it.

"I'm not paying for this!" I find myself yelling at the cab driver and the woman without thinking about what I'm saying. My hands flail up then drop in the universal urban symbol of whatthefuck. "I'm not paying for an argument!" I yell louder at both of them. She closes her door, rolls up her window, scoots her car out of the way. The cab driver rolls up his window, checks behind for traffic, and off we go. I'm back.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

The world's sent me bushels of signs that Time Like an Ever-Rolling Stream bears every lil thing away, but the most vanity-puncturing result of all has to be the increased, now more or less constant, need for (as somebody once put it) concealer in a drum. No matter how much sleep, no matter if there is pollen in the air or not, no matter whatever, there are always The Circles. Corrrrr! Looks like somebody plays the reverse telescope trick on me all the time.

So, the Sopranos? I'm still watching, only I've gotten so good at avoiding violence on the show that it's now making other awful bits--such as watching Janice trick the widower Baccalieri into marriage--newly unbearable. Yikes.

'Suddenly, two hairy-nosed otters!'

I KNOW I'm not the only one who read THAT headline this morning and got excited. Hunh! HUNH!!

Field researchers have sighted the hairy-nosed otter, the world's rarest, in a national park in southern Vietnam, a conservation group announced on Thursday. Nguyen Van Nhuan, a research officer at Vietnam's Carnivore and Pangolin Conservation Programme, said he came face-to-face with two of the endangered animals in March while doing night observations in U Minh Ha National Park in the Mekong Delta. The species was believed extinct in the 1990s, but has recently been seen in several South-East Asian countries. Nhuan's was the first sighting in Vietnam since 2000. "We could not believe our eyes," Nhuan said. "Suddenly, two hairy-nosed otters! I've never had a special feeling like that."

I think one can only assume that with the rise of the shaven look--Parisian, Hollywood, Brazilian waxings--the influence of Otterboy on the public's ideal of the otter silhouette--the preference for small-clawed otters--the rise of the metrosexual smooth coat otter--Eurasian v North American Otter Krewz--that the hairy-nosed otter felt pressure to conform and was hiding out until the zeitgeist shifted and their unkempt, nay, carefree nose hair style gained a more sympathetic home in the otter-watching population. Hence hairy-nosed otter communes all through the Delta with their prevalence of pot-smoking and hemp otterwear.
Chicago named most stressful city in the US. YES. A nigh on completely meaningless accolade, but it's hard not to try it on, like a sweater. Some parts fit.

Today's idea for something that's already been done I'm sure: A warm, fuzzy--anti-Palahni*k/non-"Guts", as it were--anthology of funny, sweet and serendipitous things that happened because of masturbation mishaps. I knocked over that small wooden box and there were the keys I thought I had lost! (par example)

More culinary leftovers successes mumblemumble see last entry: tuna/potato croquettes. It might have been tuna/potato hash, given my patience level (that is the diff twixt hash/patties; one's willingness/patience to maintain preformed shapes of things, even after they hit the oil), but they worked great - just scooped mixture (eggs, tuna, leftover potato, spices, a lil flour) with ice cream scoop right into the oil and created 8 very discreet and crisp, not too stodgy patties. They really needed something cucumber-/dill-y, raita or tsaziki, on top, but still. Good. Also good? Blondies with mini chocolate chips, made with too many chips and too much brown sugar, I think, but I was suddenly incredibly impatient (note theme) about the hard rock of sugar I had to work with and I microwaved it with too much water and suddenly had...syrup. It worked, though, with the melted butter the recipe required--they are rather toffee-like. More leftover follies TK.

Mom met Obama! We are waiting for the photographic evidence. It is so exciting.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

housewifely mumblings

My efforts to live as a frugal Italian housewife continue anew, spurred on in part by the rather terrifying financial news yesterday. One hits plateaus with this, yes. You cook your way through some stuff, think yay, think yum, then look around your kitchen starving and longing for a nice little sweet to round out your meal and think...I HAVE NOTHING TO EAT! Only it's such a first world idea, to look at full cupboards/freezer and think this. Granted, there is nothing to eat now I don't have to Make first, and the produce supply is in dire need of replenishing, but...still.

What usually seems to clear the decks for the next round of cooking is 1) doing dishes if necessary 2) latching onto one item I want to play with and building cooking adventures around that. #1's more to the point, though. Cooking is very much about thinking you have room to do it in. And doing dishes is about putting away the clean ones so you can do more. Did I mention I'm really sick of doing dishes?

I'm starting to have Too Many Grains. The cupboard's full of rices of every kind and guinoa and bulghur and stuff (finally used up the barley) that I'm not using up as fast as things I have to flavor/cook it it with. Shall tackle from that angle shortly. Surely with enough chicken stock and grains you can conquer the world... Plus I found a bag of lentils that I suddenly want to make do different things. Plus I'm eye-ing a stache of nuts in the freezer that suddenly seem like the doors to a world of savory/sweet possibility. I have pignolis...I want very much to make a nice, not-too-sweet cake with them...maybe a cornmeal one (have cornmeal in freezer). Also almond biscotti, which turn out, like all my favorite desserts, such as wacky cake, to not require spendy dairy products to make, just eggs. Although I must say that having the little 8-oz boxes of soy milk in my fridge are a *god-send* for jumping you to that place where you have more dessert possibilities. I would never use it as a substitute for milk in a flan or something, but for recipes where you need up to a cup (the BH&G brownie pudding recipe, for instance, which otherwise is a miracle of frugality--I love any recipe that lists boiling water as an ingredient), they are genius. I also adore the Pacific Organic one-cup chicken stock measures.

Today's big hit? A variation on "scrambled hamburger," a Tamny family comfort food from my dad's youth as I understand it, that I made with a mess o' nice (defrosted) Tallgrass organic beef and a big bag of boiled, then riced potatoes I tackled before they went bad. Cooked the beef with a flavory improvised sauce, then added potatoes. Delicious sludgey comfort food. Also? Amazing crisped up as hash later in a skillet. I have even more potatoes left, which may become croquettes, potato cakes, tuna cakes or a cake, or all three, depending on my energy level before I leave for the weekend.

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

all the minutiae that's fit to print

I've been collecting lil things to write about all week, small rocks tumbling about in untidy, slippery piles. We'll see how many actually make it in this lil bloggy container.

- - - - - - - - -

* The Sarah Brightman Experience. Just excruciating (I guess she's Jebus, floatin down the church aisle on wires? or fancies herself perhaps a lay clergywoman?). Just noting. PBS begathons are unbearable, period, with their special super long-lasting PBS infomercials.

* The great freezer clean-out continues...plateau-ing a little bit. In general, um, food "news":
- Strangely fantastic freezer-cleanin omelet: (defrosted) Canadian bacon sauteed with leftover sticky rice and herbs, then la eggs. Lots of pepper. God....really good.
- I made Kraft Mac & Cheese the other night with a lump of imported Danish butter and organic chicken stock. What's the opposite word of slumming? It was pretty good, yo.
- Amazing dinner of just briefly sauteed fresh corn off the cob with butter and salt and a glass of eh Riesling that looked nice but was eh. And that's it. Midwest has some perks.
- Zingerman's Hot Cocoa coffeecake: as good as the kinda brill name makes it sound. OH my.

* All the talk about hurricanes recently made me think about my grandfather. Here he is in the late 40s/early 50s with his hurricane-hunting plane in Miami. He's the tallest guy, third from left.

* Can't get this BRILLIANT, albeit ABBREVIATED tune outta head. Immodest note: I am very good at singing the word "nude" the way "Clinton" does. You have to sing it like the word "few" in "precious and few" in "Cherish." Fiyooooooouuuooo!

* Bonnie Hunt needs to stop making HAH HAH self-actualized hilarious size jokes for her new show. She's losin me. Hard to see women comedians do that.

* Sometimes when you have to have an ultrasound, you have to drink (a lot of) water in advance. It is the most excruciating kind of dance, to try to drink enough yet not too much that you have to stop on the way there, yet...I was thinking in my over-watered haze that only John Cage, maybe, could write a piece to express what this is like, this bizarro dance of the waters. Pauses and pain and absurdity...

* The GOP is using their VP nom like a FUCKING BOUNTY PAPER TOWEL. And that's all I can say about that at the moment. GOOD GOD DAMN.

* HGTV: 1/2 "This room is so blah/has no color/let's paint!"; 1/2 "What were they thinking/let's strip it/let's paint over that bad color decision!" And so it goes. They're set for life.

* Under the category of MOST EMAILED PHOTO at Yahoo news photos right now is this one, left, with the following cap:
"A passenger waits for a delayed flight at Heathrow airport's terminal four in London August 12, 2006. REUTERS/Toby Melville"

I'm not really trying to call the world sizeist all over again (mmm I am), but still--what possible reason can there be for this 2-yr-old photo comin out (on a "most-emailed" scale, I mean) again except the circus lady side of it? What is the point? Wonder what spiked the interest in it. There must be some fat girl-likers in the mix, but not enough to make it most emailed. All I know is ow...sigh. That chair musta hurt like hell, poor patient lady; my hips would do that too.

* Alt*n Brown: often verrrrrrrrrrry jerky on his Apolcalypse Now/middle-aged crisis food-travel shows. Why don't people see it? I have wanted to smack him a few times.

* My friend Karla likes to get a "good stare" going after a meal; fix her eyes and let them...relax. I tease her about it, although I totally love a good stare too. The thing I'm realizing--there always have to be a few moving objects (usually people) in a good stare. But you don't *care* about them, as such. You're not watching them. They are just in the stare frame. And if you shift your glance to more completely inanimate objects...it's not as good a stare. Funny how that is. Has to be some relatively stationary but still squirming object in the frame. Hence restaurant stares being really good.

* There is now a complexion treatment system called "Shiva." Anybody else find this funny? (or sad?)

* Rufus Sewell appears to be pulling a 'House'--i.e., English actor slumming in American TV shows that pay more and live long past their sell-by date. I think Rufus likes Americans a little more than Hugh does, though. I always feel like Hugh's cackling when he counts his checks before flying off to Majorca to don his djibou and smoke pot.

* J-Lo is looking pulled very tight (facially). Sort of....Veronica Castro. Lil glimpse into the future there.

Monday, September 08, 2008


I haven't been able to get this out of my head since I heard it yesterday. It's my friend Holly's dad, Glenn Yarbrough, singing a great pop tune that's downright hooky/perky/uplifting/has a great percussion arrangement. Sometime way back in the beginning of his performing career that somebody dug up on YouTube.

Saturday, September 06, 2008

pensive Maya Deren urban chat against da rain






















oh! yeah, also, she can steal your soul by lookin atcha

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

By the way, I don't know if you've noticed, but post-jail M*rtha Stewart is taking over the world, in ways/scope she never was before. I find her quantum leaps significant, culturally, in terms of what she's selling. Here they are:

M*rtha's Business Diary
  • Here is a beautifully designed bedroom of a certain aesthetic in my own home with an antique hobnail lamp to help set the mood. Here's how to find hobnail lamps (auctions, tag sales).

    • The flavor of what's being sold changes a lot from the switch from just books to MStewLiving/magazines, and even from the Time-Life to the autonomous/MLSO regimes. Adds immediacy and push.

  • Here's a beautifully designed bedroom in a home that may or may not be mine with an antique hobnail lamp to set the mood which you can get nationally at the following locations.
- divorce -
  • Here's a beautifully designed bedroom... You can now buy a hobnail lamp through us, M*rtha by Mail, from our favorite manufacturer. No more "looking."
- jail -
  • Pause, look at pretty pix in magazines (here's a beautifully designed bedroom...), not currently selling hobnail lamps at the moment.
- post-jail -
  • I have a business partnership with the company that makes hobnail lamps that I continue to feature in beautifully designed bedrooms in my magazine, and will be receiving percentages of profits.

  • You can buy an entire M*rtha Stewart house, and buy a hobnail lamp to put in a beautifully designed bedroom in it that I continue to feature in my magazine, and will be receiving percentages of profits therefrom.
These new KB/MStew homes... You can now buy the dream wholesale, is the point. I can't really believe the business partnerships she's formed in recent years...the scope is astonishing. She has her stink on everything. Makes some of the M*rtha, Inc. era shennanigans that we all thought were so Borgia-like look like child's play.







An idiotic want that never, ever wanes! I don't like everything of his, but I do love me some Aaron Basha, especially the classic enameled shoes.

The Chicken Initiative (as Skip calls it) continues apace. I can see the back of the freezer! Last night: grilled (defrosted) ham with a quick sort of red-eye pan gravy, grits with pepper and (defrosted) havarti and (defrosted) white corn. Although now (finally) having had fresh summer corn, I'm not sure why I bother eating anything else, ever.

I was going to say something nasty about the GOPVPNOM, but I shan't. Except that I continue to be offended by the idea that one woman nom should be just like the other to a partisan woman voter just like me. Clarence Thomas phenom.

In love: this Shaker sewing desk. Shaker stuff does not always light huge aesthetic fires inside me (except, frankly, peg board--I have dreams of rooms with miles and miles of peg board on it), maybe cause of all the Shaker in the New Country in the 80s, but really it's not just that, ANYHOW...I've been searching around for a good woven (hopefuly legged) old-fashioned sewing basket and found this--not what I want, but how hot, eh? Mmmmm.....SIDEWAYS drawers.

To my People magazine brain, when I think of Apocalypse Now, it sparks your basic network strike of connections to stuff like Martin Sheen having a heart attack in Hearts of Darkness...FFCoppola sitting in the Caffe Trieste...Frederic Forrest in shiny 70s photos with Marilu Henner...Laurence Fishburne so young he's barely recognizable...the dream Indochine plantation dwellers in the redux version...stories of John Milius in You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again....whatever BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH. But I never ever think about Harrison Ford! I know it's not a big part, but I swear it rarely comes up on his resume anyhow. It's weird. Like he wasn't even in it!!! Very weird. The point being...if movie stars, as the theorists say, carry an aggregate of all the characters they play with them from movie to movie, that is not a part of American cultural baggage I associate with le Indy--Vietnam. Even--esp.--with American Graffiti--doesn't he get out of the draft somehow?

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

help

What do you do with old cassette tapes?