Cahiers du Moment

Movie & TV Violence Guides!

2012-01-12T00:43:00.015-06:00

Here are all eleven of the violence guides I have so far! For your--partial--viewing pleasure. Violence guides (see previous posts here and here) are chronologically arranged summaries of potentially nervous-making violence in movies or TV shows, so that you know what to expect and how to watch/watch around them/watch through your sweater, knowing when it's safe to watch again. When it's all less gross, violent, gloppy, gory, whatever.

These guides were written by my friend Will. (That is--I can take credit for nothing but the phobia and the page-coding.) You will notice his efforts to pacify nervousness in the way things are worded, and in his kindly but addicted use of the smiley face emoticon. I edited some of those out but after a while, figured...ah. What the heck.

Some of the guides, when you click on them, are color-coded (black = not scary; green = kinda; yellow = gah; red = OMG). Some are not. Some in addition/instead contain a 0 - 3 ranking scale (0 = not scary; 1 = kinda; 2 = gah; 3 = OMG). Some do not!

A sample time stamp might look like this (from No Country for Old Men) :

00:18:20 - A man gets shot at a few times and at 00:19:10 he gets shot in the shoulder, but he's only slightly wounded.

So you can see that every guide contains by definition some (usually very vague) SPOILERS. You've been warned. In every case the guides were written to MINIMIZE SPOILERS, but--but. It happens. The whole point of the violence guide is to help you get through the movie you couldn't watch without it--information will be spilled. There will be blood, yo...there will be blood.

Thanks, Will!

Fight Club! is what those boys do!
Inside Man! is inside! or is he!
Jackie Brown! from downtown!
Lord of the Rings! not one, not two, all three!
The Matrix! has lots of glop!
No Country for Old Men! get out, old men!
The Prestige! is an abstract noun!
There Will Be Blood! no way! Gross!
The Ring! is scary ringy!
The Wire! is fantastic TV but damn dire!
V Is for Vendetta! and for violence guides!

Note: These violence guides do not constitute a thumb-up of the movie in question.

2012-01-07T02:29:00.001-06:00

2011-11-28T03:44:00.000-06:00

2011-11-18T15:03:00.003-06:00

(p.s. I post this not as a Tumblr-like nod to my mood or a hint at some unspoken breakup, but because I LOVE THIS STILL--the top one. The note. The last time I saw it was in college, when I saw The Tramp, and just found that bit of writing the coolest thing ever. I wrote the words out on a little sheet of mauve linen laid stationary and had it taped to my wall for years. It's kind of amazing to me [still] that I could find it in 5 minutes on the internet when I finally decided to look for it. Anyhow, it's just gorgeous, I think. And has quite an impact in a silent film, which, despite the interstitials, is a very image-driven world. I remember it just leaping off the screen at me.)

once every couple years I wonder anew

2011-11-12T08:49:00.003-06:00

What the hell is up with this?

That is Maxim de Winter to the second Mrs. de Winter, ramping up to the denouement of Rebecca, confessing his killing of his first wife (Rebecca).

It's so bald and discrete, that sentence--referenced by nothing in the book before or after. It's dropped like a tidy little grenade, pin in, in the middle of a confession so shocking that it distracts you from what's being said. "I'd forgotten"…forgotten? Maxim has shot people before?

Because of a perennial mystery novel mindset and a love of discordance, I have generally chosen to see the comment as meaningful and mysterious--once I noticed it. However, chances are really good DuMaurier was telling us, more "prosaically," that Maxim had shot people in World War I.

I've decided that makes it no less shocking, though. There is no context for Maxim's comment at all. I don't think there is any talk anywhere in the book of his military service (rather the opposite--all Maxim does is run Manderley; he has no 'job'). Or anybody's. (Am I wrong? Does Frank Crawley talk about it?)

But if the comment is indeed a casual reference to the horrors of World War I, and not a hint at further lurid personal history from Maxim, it's still rather shocking as an assumption of experience, by a certain kind of person and/or DuMaurier's readers. It's sad.

I admire her for dropping it in those last chapters, which (I'm such a middle class dilettante lady) I admire themselves so much for their plotting. I think they're just beautiful. I love that Rebecca is smarter than every character, that the secret revealed by Dr. Baker at the end isn't the one we expected, but makes things clear nonetheless and in fact opens things up even more. It's all just cool.

I have made an effort at other DuMaurier--Jamaica Inn and Frenchman's Creek. No go. I don't think I like gothic/horror books very much, or perhaps I am too impatient. Who knows. I'll try again.

And whom did Maxim shoot?

2011-11-10T02:38:00.002-06:00

I fell in love with this beautiful little train station last month. It's the Beverly Shores stop on the South Shore line, a Spanish-style building constructed in 1929 and renovated about 10 years ago. Note the living space for the ticket agent built into it, seen in this link. You can't quite tell in the photos, but the lettering on the "Beverly Shores" sign--and coloring of the lettering in the various outlines--even when the neon isn't lit, is extremely bold and flamboyant. Personality-filled. There is a font based on it!

now with more air!

2011-11-10T02:24:00.002-06:00

It's a bit macabre, but I love that there are some salty snacks out there now whose prices reflect exactly what's (not) in them. In the case of Munchos and Chester's Puffcorn: there is a lot of AIR--for which you are not paying. A big bag of these extruded, puffy thnackth is only $2, which, really, makes sense. Maybe we don't want to know what ingredients really are in things, but still. Something about it pleases me.

calligraffiti

2011-11-10T02:15:00.002-06:00

The thing I enjoy most about this man's work, I think, is how it recreates/puts you in touch with the energetic joy of letters coming alive under your hands. Very very happy feeling. Can taste it. I have to say it: kinetic. KIIIINEEETTTTIC.

great quotes out of context

2011-11-09T20:27:00.002-06:00

"Always distrust the man who looks you straight in the eyes. He wants to prevent you from seeing something. Look for it."
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Political blah-blah--especially coverage of possible GOP presidential candidates--makes me think of this line. The real problems are not there.

movies with really big people on the walls

2011-10-16T21:04:00.002-05:00

are extra good:

2011-10-14T20:36:00.001-05:00

souply, bookly, posterly promotion

2011-10-13T16:23:00.001-05:00

The Soup & Bread Cookbook, written by Martha Bayne, designed by Sheila Sachs, and illustrated by Paul Dolan, is having a release party at the Hideout on November 2. The book has gotten amazing reviews and shoutouts already- The Onion - TOC - Examiner.com Grub Street Chicago - Chicagoist.com - leaving me unsurprised but so heartened and excited. I drew a poster for the release party--click the fragment below to see the whole thing.

C O M E O N O U T ! ! !

(click image to embiggen)

solid proof of a leak between the Super Troopers/Bull Durham continuums

2011-10-12T13:47:00.001-05:00

Annie Savoy's house:

Arcot "Thorny" Ramathorn's house:

lucky me

2011-10-05T18:51:00.003-05:00

Every once in a while the world's greatest male houseguest to whom I'm not related shows up on my doorstep with flour and yeast--quite literally, bag in hand--and he bakes bread and we cook and he does the occasional chore around the house that can only be done by someone who is his height. He is a Gem.

The last time he did this we made beef stroganoff. Notice the homemade bread. WGMHWINR bought for the creation of said dish tenderloin roast. I don't know about you, but the cuts of meat in my life these days aren't ever that swanky, when I have them at all. I am pretty sure I gasped when he pulled it out of the bag; gasped like I had just won the Showcase Showdown, gasped like a British housewife opening a packet of sausages during rationing, clucking in astonished matronly you-shouldn't-haves.

It made a spectacular stroganoff, then two delicious little stir-fry things from slices sawed off the hunk left in the freezer. Tonight I used up the remaining hunklet of roast beast and it turned out so well I thought I'd memorialize it so I wouldn't forget it, should such a succulent cut of meat ever enter my life again.

Rice: Grate one large shallot into 2 T. melted butter and stir, cooking, for a couple minutes. Add 2 c. of brown rice and toast and stir for some minutes more. Add 4 c. of chicken stock and a dash of salt. Cook the full time, covered, making sure you let the rice rest after you fluff it after cooking.

Roast Beast: Pat the meat dry and pepper it. Sear it on all sides in an oven-safe pan that has been heating well over medium heat for a while (I used vegetable oil to do this). Once it's seared, take meat out of the pan and brush it with Dijon mustard and sprinkle it with dried thyme. Put it in 450º oven and cook until internal temp is 120-ish. (I overcooked mine by some people's tenderloin standards--just slightly pink in the middle--but I thought it was delicious and the burneded, crisp bits on the edges were great.)

When the meat is done, put it on a plate, sprinkle lightly with kosher salt (which will melt into the meat), and tent with aluminum foil. Pour off any remaining vegetable oil from cooking the meat, then return pan to burner over medium-high heat. Deglaze pan well with leftover red wine in your fridge door and when that's done and it's thickened a little bit, add a knob of butter and stir to combine. Slice the rested meat, lay it on the rice, then pour the sauce over all.

Sometimes I get close to being a vegetarian, then stuff like this happens.

2011-10-02T00:47:00.005-05:00

From a French trade publication c. 1990; found at my job at this co.
I used it as my letterhead for years.

more hints from Lizoise

2011-09-30T03:27:00.002-05:00

I don't know about you, but I have a particularly hard time paying retail for shampoo. There's just something about how expensive it is that makes me feel used as a consumer to the point of fighting back.

One way I've managed this for a long time is to only buy shampoo on sale/discounted/from clearance/with tons of coupons. I try to have more than one bottle "going" at any given time.

The other thing I do is make sure I have an old, wide-mouthed shampoo bottle on hand in the shower. When a current bottle of shampoo gets down to the bottom and I begin wrestling with it to squeeze that last 1/4" out, I just flip it over onto the old bottle and let gravity do the work. I let the shampoo drain for a day or so, then just cap the old wide-mouthed shampoo bottle and shake it up. You end up with a fruity melange of shampoos that works well, but mostly it's satisfying knowing you've gotten all of it out of the bottle. I am determined to get that last $.03 worth, you know? Especially when most of what I'm paying for is packaging and shipping.

With this technique you never are too dependent on one bottle of shampoo, or on having to pay full price for a bottle of shampoo, or on struggling with the last dregs to get enough to wash your hair. I've had my "drainage" bottle for a long time. It's like those legendary sourdough starters from the 19th century: never runs out.

Yours in nerdery, frugality, etc.

2011-09-19T21:40:00.003-05:00

fabulous title page

2011-09-06T18:38:00.001-05:00

2011-08-21T02:12:00.000-05:00

Where, Bredon asked himself, did the money come from that was to be spent so variously and so lavishly? If this hell's-dance of spending and saving were to stop for a moment, what would happen? If all the advertising in the world were to shut down tomorrow, would people still go on buying more soap, eating more apples, giving their children more vitamins, roughage, milk, olive oil, scooters and laxatives, learning more languages by gramophone, hearing more virtuosos by radio, re-decorating their houses, refreshing themselves with more non-alcoholic thirst-quenchers, cooking more new, appetizing dishes, affording themselves that little extra touch which means so much? Or would the whole desperate whirligig slow down, and the exhausted public relapse upon plain grub and elbow-grease? He did not know. Like all rich men, he had never before paid any attention to advertisements. He had never realized the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure forever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion.

Dorothy L. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise (1933)

pieces by Arthur Watts

2011-06-29T14:31:00.001-05:00

A Modern Christmas

"And there's a nice little book on Picasso for you Laura."

Courtesy, Then and Now (from Punch)

From the website The Art of Arthur Watts

2011-06-25T21:14:00.001-05:00

Mona looked away. "He made me feel like such a damned fool."

"Oh, Mona, we're all damned fools! Some of us just have more fun with it than others. Loosen up, dear! Don't be so afraid to cry...or laugh, for that matter. Laugh all you want and cry all you want and whistle at pretty men in the street and to hell with anybody who thinks you're a damned fool!" She lifted the wineglass in a toast to the younger woman. "I love you, dear. And that makes you free to do anything."

Armistead Maupin, More Tales of the City

40 Favorite Moments From Roseanne

2011-06-08T05:55:00.024-05:00

These are not chosen to be the Best-Of in any comprehensive sense, but as part of a (necessarily incomplete) list of small moments in the show (acting, writing, stage business) for which I still watch and in which I still revel, many years and viewings later. They are not meant to pinpoint everything that was great about Roseanne, but they certainly hint at it; when this show was good, it was really good. [Note: I am not a fan of mid-season 5 and later, so that's where my list stops.]

1. Season 1, Episode 9
There weren't that many really good episodes in the first season, but this is a great one. Roseanne (Roseanne Barr) stops Dan (John Goodman) from fighting at his birthday party at the Lobo Lounge, and later at home he takes out his frustration in a realistically frightening way on a piece of drywall as daughter Darlene (Sara Gilbert) looks on, scared and saying nothing.

2. Season 2, Episode 2
Roseanne ends a goofy physical fight with Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) by grimly showing her what could happen if she decides to become a police officer.

3. Season 2, Episode 4
During the end credits Dan and Roseanne try to move a refrigerator out of the house and cuss in a constant, over the top, bleeped barrage.

4. Season 2, Episode 9
Dan, warming up for a Thanksgiving day football game, moves the couch in one huge charge. Dude was willing to be very physical.

5. Season 2, Episode 10
From the first really great episode (written by Joss Whedon). Darlene is rebelling against reading her prize poem in public, and Roseanne opens up the topic while cutting coupons by silently extending her hand with the scissors in them.

6. Season 2, Episode 10
Darlene reads her poem, which reveals unsuspected vulnerability. The frozen look on Gilbert's face is perfect.

7. Season 2, Episode 13
Roseanne was always great at depicting weaselly bosses (I could never vote for Fred Thompson after seeing him play Roseanne's evil factory boss in season one). Brian (Peter Smith) was really well-written: young, tyrannical, insecure, clueless, sad. Roseanne has him over to dinner to ask for better hours only to have him fire her anyhow as her family freaks out.

8. Season 3, Episode 1
DJ (Michael Fishman) fills his cereal bowl by adding some, swiping some off, adding some more, and swiping again. From a great real-time episode that shows whole family waiting for results of Roseanne's pregnancy test.

9. Season 3, Episode 3
The whole family walks in on Darlene making out with a friend, only Dan has no idea what's going on. The show uses the device of Dan's cluelessness really well more than once.

10. Season 3, Episode 4

"I've got a Salisbury steak and a Swiss steak. Who gets the Salisbury steak? Okay then, you'd be the person to ask: which one is it?

[Puts plate down]

Enjoy your, uh, thing."

-- Roseanne's first day as a waitress at Rodbell's.

11. Season 3, Episode 5
Becky (Alicia Goranson) and Darlene find unexplained evidence of DJ's weirdness.

12. Season 3, Episode 6

"What was once the cradle of our love is now landfill."

-- Roseanne and Dan toast their old mattress at the Lobo.

13. Season 3, Episode 9
Roseanne confronts Becky's principal (another great weasel, played by Dann Florek) about her kid's behavior in an inspired little speech about mothering:

"No matter how much we try to control what our kids do, at some point they are just gonna do what they're gonna do. They are like people that way."

14. Season 3, Episode 10
The woman Dan has been having erotic dreams about (played by Patrika Darbo) is revealed. The fact that she a chubby little thing shocked me to the bone the first time I saw this episode; the show in these seasons still seems ahead of its time with regard to size by just letting its large (main) characters just be, most of the time.

15. Season 3, Episode 11
Dan and Roseanne go out to dinner to celebrate the first time they had sex, and tell each other what they first noticed about each other.

16. Season 3, Episode 13

"I'm making your dad's favorite tuna casserole. I know. It's god-awful, isn't it? And especially the way I make it."

17. Season 3, Episode 13

"How could he do anything like that, he's not even home. So, where'd you find it? All right, so just put it in a bag, and I'll bury it when I get there."

-- More never-explained weird behavior from DJ.

18. Season 3, Episode 14
The sped-up bunnyhop from the video of Dan's father's wedding.

19. Season 3, Episode 15
Becky is staying at Jackie's after a fight with Roseanne, and Roseanne, missing her, starts crying after seeing Becky's copy of AC/DC's Highway to Hell.

20. Season 3, Episode 17

"Guilt is a many-splendored thing."

-- Roseanne to Jackie, after Dan comes home with a late Valentine's Day present.

21. Season 3, Episode 18

"Why are your words. So. Halting."

-- Jackie, doing community theater, prompted by Roseanne from behind the scenes.

22. Season 3, Episode 19

"Exxxxcellent."

-- Jackie to Darlene after breaking up a fight between two boys fighting over Darlene.

23. Season 3, Episode 20

Dan: Too thick, Beck?
Becky: I think I just broke a rib.

-- Dan and Becky make up after a fight by having milkshakes.

24. Season 3, Episode 21
From the episode in which we first meet Roseanne's snooty neighbor, Kathy Bowman (Meagan Fay). After a fight Roseanne goes over to Kathy's house to eat crow so that their boys can still play together.

Kathy: Well, so long as you are admitting that you are wrong.
[Barr takes takes almost 10 seconds to respond, bobbing her head to keep from lashing out.]
Roseanne: Fine.

25. Season 3, Episode 22

Roseanne: It's Saturday night, it's 2:00 a.m. and Becky's not home from her date yet...what do you do?
Jackie: Okay. Am I home from my date yet--where am I?

-- Jackie and Roseanne are going over theoretical questions about what to do if Jackie inherits the kids. Metcalf has so many amazing moments like this, when she does a huge amount with her lines.

26. Season 3, Episode 24
Bonnie (Bonnie Bramlett), a fellow Rodbell's waitress, breaks out in a great version of "You Really Got a Hold on Me" at a barbecue (Bramlett is a singer, the first white Ikette with Ike and Tina Turner and half of Delaney & Bonnie on Stax Records).

27. Season 4, Episode 2

Dan: I remember when I first found that bike. Just a rusted-out piece of junk. But I saw the potential. I took it back to the shop--pounded out the dents--chromed it--repainted it--
Roseanne: Boring, boring, boring, boring, boring. Get to the part where I smoked the guy into buying it.

-- Roseanne and Dan are gloating over a check after finally selling a cycle.

28. Season 4, Episode 3

"I'm 36 years old. I've got flabby arm and pelican neck, and all my houseplants are dead and no one loves me, but what difference does that make anyway, because everything in my life sucks!"

-- Jackie, flailing to explain a dumb decision to sleep with Arnie (Tom Arnold).

29. Season 4, Episode 4
From the first episode in which Darlene starts to become depressed, a plot development that the show, contrary to every sitcom rule, lets simmer unresolved over the course of the season.

[the phone rings]
Roseanne: Darlene, it's for you.
Darlene: Who is it?
Roseanne: It's Marcy.
Darlene: What's she want?
Roseanne: I don't know what she--[getting mad, throwing phone across floor] She wants you to pick up the phone.

30. Season 4, Episode 10
Depressed Darlene comes downstairs after avoiding Thanksgiving dinner to find her mother in the kitchen drinking beer and recovering from the chaos.

31. Season 4, Episode 13
From a great episode in which Roseanne makes fun of Crystal (Natalie West) for taking her to bingo then gets addicted to it. It suddenly gets serious when Crystal, who already has a nine-month-old baby, explains her bitchy mood by revealing that she's pregnant again. West manages to convey how cornered her character feels by this unplanned pregnancy in a fairly short scene.

32. Season 4, Episode 15

"You look like that Fonzie fellow who's so popular."

-- Becky's grandmother (Estelle Parsons) to Becky's boyfriend, Mark (Glenn Quinn). Great episode, with extremely realistic, territorial conflict between Dan and his mother-in-law.

33. Season 4, Episode 16

"I'm nervous, honey."

-- Dan, worried about having sex with Roseanne after her breast reduction surgery.

34. Season 4, Episode 19

"Is that so."

-- Dan, smirking at Jackie, who worries that he won't be able to eat on camera for a Rodbell's commercial if he's eating now too.

35. Season 4, Episode 21

"Listen, Darlene. What I would do, or Mr. X. would do, is not the point. You're asking me what you should do, right? Well, let me put it this way: You have never in your life done anything just to please somebody else. Why start now?"

-- Dan's advice to Darlene, who is asking him how to handle a boy who's interested in her.

36. Season 4, Episode 25
Dan and Roseanne beam when DJ gets the word FORECLOSURE in a spelling bee, after a bitter fight in which Becky realizes they have no money for college for her.

37. Season 5, Episode 3
Another virtuoso scene from Metcalf who runs around Dan and Roseanne's kitchen making breakfast, not realizing that their power's been cut off.

38. Season 5, Episode 8
Jackie laughs at Roseanne's description of lesbians wearing plaid shirts and being truckers before noticing her own outfit (Barr loses it).

39. Season 5, Episode 13

Roseanne: I would never have moved in with no guy so damn fast.
Jackie: Maybe you wouldn't, but this isn't you, it's me, and there's a real easy way to tell us apart. [Gesturing] You -- me. YOU -- ME."

40. Season 13, Episode 2
An amazing wordless little moment, after Roseanne tells Dan that Jackie's boyfriend has beaten her up. Roseanne looks at Dan, who says nothing but immediately walks out, leaning back in to grab his jacket as he goes. We know from this that Dan is going to beat him up.•

Shut It Down

2011-06-03T12:33:00.009-05:00

Please cancel 30 Rock. It's not going to happen, but I'll say it anyhow: shut it down.

Alec Baldwin, who has made it clear that the coming season is his last, announced in April that 2012 was also "the last year of the show," period, but then quickly took it back: "I want to take the opportunity to state that although my days on network TV may be numbered, I hope 30 Rock goes on forever. Or at least as long as everyone involved desires."

Ungh, I don't. I wonder if Baldwin really does either--it sounds like somebody nudged him.

I am a huge 30 Rock fan. I started watching the show sometime around late 2008 (thank you Netflix Streaming, for letting me swan dive into season one all at once), and since then I've seen every episode many times, revisited whole seasons repeatedly, clutched it tight like a favorite stuffed animal. I haven't quite pawed over every favorite bit of writing (Pizzarina Sbarro!), but I've absorbed it completely happily as it came at me.

But in the last few years the show has been showing its age and I've increasingly wished that it would end. It's become thin. From a literal, joke-counting POV, it might be funnier--a constant barrage of wordy humor--but it's not as good. This show that was always great at being about a group of people--because it was about a group of people--has more or less become centered around a core of two, who do most of the work with long speeches. Baldwin's acting abilities are up for it (although it's not as fun); Tina Fey's aren't. I think she's extremely neato, but she wasn't meant to do that much heavy lifting.

At its best, 30 Rock is propulsive, constantly surprising, opening our understanding of characters with each little interaction in a constellation of ways, but the show has started to pat premises and characterizations harder into place with each joke (let Lutz break out a little, eh?). And the show has ended up in some tired sitcom places (classic stuff like will TGS be canceled?).

The show's not bad--it's not bad! (Although the bag-in-the-tree/smooth-move-Ferguson episode sure flirted with it). Just not so great, for a show that used to to be much better than it had to be. The 100th episode, which in the context of the first couple seasons would have seemed formulaic and a little sentimental, actually seemed pretty good to me, which says something.

I don't know why I assumed 30 Rock could avoid the trap of the TV show that Will Not Die, especially as it hung on long enough to get sucked into the gravitational pull of the 100-episode syndication landmark. That pull is so strong that it seems to dominate the lifespan of any show that hints at going into a fourth season--pulling it past a fifth, into a sixth to validate the decision, or further.

It's especially painful when good TV shows go out this way (or don't go out, being the point). Why do we want TV shows to last forever, when it's a problematic idea for even arguably more worthy constructions, such as actual human beings, to do so? We do, though--we want TV shows to have eternal life. The BBC ran two spectacular, zippy seasons of The Office, with one satisfying Christmas episode wrap-up, but NBC cranked out seven seasons of the US version and when the premise was bled dry and natural plot developments explored and everyone spawned and partnered and the lead actor finally had to leave, they transplanted another lead to keep the body alive. We do this all the time to keep these carcasses going: push in the Ted McGinleys and the Replacement Blondes, Kids, and Love Interests. Two and a Half Men just drafted Ashton Kutcher to wear the wacky brother jersey for one more season, even though it's a reasonable guess nobody thinks it's going to last much longer. There are no DNR orders for TV shows--we try heroic shit until there's just no point. (And these days we reboot it ten years later, anyhow.)

I remember a friend turning to me after a Simpsons episode one Sunday night in the early 1990s, probably sometime in the middle of the third season when things started to get really good, and saying with a kind of worried happiness, "Are these always going to be so good?" The shows were so great, so funny, it was hard to imagine them being anything but--but. We knew it couldn't last forever.

It would not have occurred to us to imagine that the show would be on the air twenty-two years later (like imagining our parents at age 190), kept going with good writers--but for what real reason other than money? Surely one of the benefits with creative creations is to shape them as best we can? Not letting them linger?

I know I'm priggish and idealistic. This whole topic is a terrible hobbyhorse of mine, because it bums me to see a show that has always gone its own way grind down to mediocrity or unavoidable TV cliches to keep itself on the air, not to mention sitcoms can go to some bad places past five or six seasons (look at Roseanne). 30 Rock is starting to look a little like late-seasons Simpsons: funny from the outside-in, with less emotional core.

I found 30 Rock at a rough time in my life, and if I were inclined to write "Dear Tina Fey" letters I might tell her that the show was smart, engaging solace, right when I needed it, every time. There was something sort of magical about how good it was, how fun and smart and solid. The show is still way too smart not to know what's happening to it (the writers even play with it sometimes)--but I wish somebody would just pull the plug.

I'm an artistic genius*

2011-06-01T20:14:00.005-05:00

Make delicious, delicious oatmeal cookie batter, by substituting c. 3-1/2 cups of oatmeal for about 1 to 1-1/4 cups of flour in the Nestle Tollhouse Cookie recipe.

[Licks of this unbaked batter are maybe the most delicious, salty-stuff sweet in the world, but do y'all find cookie dough ice cream remotely successful at accessing that taste for our pleasure? Grainy lumps of tasteless sweet, they are.]

Flatten scoops of batter on a cookie sheet. Top with a square of Ghirardelli caramel milk chocolate, then, a slightly smaller round of dough that you flatten carefully over the top and seal up around the edges.

Cook the usual way, maybe until a little browner than usual, and let sit and cool very thoroughly, until these become stabilized cookie/candy situations, with a lovely striation of the Ghirardelli throughout.

EAT.

*Not really. Movie quote. Just hyperbolating.

barbarakruger-ish door

2011-05-19T18:00:00.001-05:00

2011-04-26T01:54:00.001-05:00

2011-04-23T19:15:00.000-05:00

Elizabeth Taylor's death has liberated one of my caged, ever-cycling thoughts about her, which is: THOSE EYEBROWS. Question, statement, exclamation: those eyebrows!

Were they not rather transgressive? Were they not something more than the combination of the styles of the time and studio managing and her own follicular biology? They were extraordinary, bold things, weirder and bigger than any I ever see. They are the biggest thing on her face. They really worked.

2011-04-20T10:18:00.003-05:00

He had somehow vaguely imagined that, the end of desire attained, soul and sense would lie down together like the lion and the lamb; but they did nothing of the sort. With orb and sceptre thrust into his hands, he was afraid to take hold on power and call his empire his own.

Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon

it's that time of year

2011-04-13T15:03:00.001-05:00

I repeat myself. But I don't care! Spring needs Heinrich H.

Herz, mein Herz, sei nicht beklommen,
Und ertrage dein Geschick,
Neuer Frühling gibt zurück,
Was der Winter dir genommen.

Und wie viel ist dir geblieben!
Und wie schön ist noch die Welt!
Und, mein Herz, was dir gefällt,
Alles, alles darfst du lieben!

karottensalat!

2011-04-11T21:36:00.001-05:00

In classic--nay, clichéd--culinary fashion, I invented this recipe with no time, no money, and very little in my pantry to inspire me, but I liked it so much after that first time that I have kept making it since. Here 'tis.

1. Slice up a big mess of carrots into rounds.

2. Make a vinaigrette:

Microwave equal-ish amounts (1/2 c? 3/4 c?) of honey and soy sauce, so that the honey can be combined with the soy using a little whisk.
Add vinegar--this time I sloshed in a little rice wine vinegar, Riesling vinegar, and cider vinegar.
Grate in garlic (I used maybe 3-4 cloves) and a couple inches of ginger with a fine grater.
I added the juice of a tangerine. I've also added lemon, lime, grapefruit.
Add a little salt, and more pepper.

The vinaigrette is rather too sweet for straight consumption, but it will work well in this salad.

3. Throw a big pile of sunflower seeds in the oven on a baking sheet (or toaster oven, as I did here). Toast them until they are brown, with lots of kosher salt. Don't overcook! Easy to do that.

4. MIX EVERYTHING TOGETHER: the seeds, the vinaigrette, the carrots. This salad has a great lifespan in the fridge, due to the sturdiness of the carrots. It has a nice sweet, tangy, salty satisfaction to it and great CHEW. Yay!

2011-04-08T14:41:00.002-05:00

"Dear Teresa," exclaimed the Princess. "You are so wonderful! But you have had so many experiences. I feel I could never really love anyone unless he was pale, but pale . . . with violent rippling hair, and had eyes, blue, but blue, as skies in May, and could boast a big-big. Oh," she abstrusely broke-off, "have you ever loved anyone just like that, Teresa?"

"Several," answered the Baroness, recklessly. And as the Princess expressed a wish to know more, she was obliged to rise to her feet. These sentimental talks she usually learned to repent.

Ronald Firbank, The Artificial Princess

Eunice and Ernie

2011-04-05T15:43:00.023-05:00

I have been thinking recently about the fact that--if you look at it from a certain angle--Rock Hudson came out at a press conference for a TV show with Doris Day on the Christian Broadcasting Network.

Elizabeth Taylor's death and the resultant focus on her work to fund AIDS research, work which began near the time of--and was galvanized by--Hudson's death from the disease in 1985, has made me think about this, as has Day's recent birthday. Day has never involved herself in the politics of AIDS, but she was there at a crucial moment.

Just as people often don't know what to make of Day in general--in the (overall wonderful) New York Times piece by Manohla Dargis about Elizabeth Taylor, which began with "the last movie star died Wednesday," Dargis referred to Day as a "professional virgin" [the #1 inaccurate and easy Day slag]--I have a sense that people don't always recognize Day's role in how AIDS walked up to the camera to be seen.

I am guessing from what I know of Day's personal politics (which I don't agree with) that they make it easier for people to cast her (as James Wolcott wrote in his amazing Vanity Fair article about the Day/Hudson pairing) as a "counterrevolutionary," but regardless, her friendship with and loyalty to Hudson, and his in return, meant that at a crucial moment in his life and ultimately, modern American history, they stood together to be seen. That seems terribly important, looking back.

Day asked Hudson to be the first guest on her TV show. Hudson was ill, emaciated. No one knew what he "had," although there was much harsh speculation, and nobody knew Hudson was gay (although apparently everyone in Hollywood and the gay world knew). This man had been keeping secrets all his life, and instead of clutching them tighter, he suddenly left them go in the most unlikely of places.

From the Wolcott piece:

In 1985, Hudson accepted an invitation to take part in the promotional launch of Doris Day’s Best Friends, an animal show she was doing for the Christian Broadcasting Network. A gesture of friendship, it proved to be a tragic folly. “Here was a man with only ten weeks to live,” note the authors of [Hudson biography] Idol, “a man who had successfully hidden the secret of his terrible disease for over a year, who had kept the secret of his homosexuality from the world for a lifetime--about to allow it all to disintegrate by appearing at a routine news conference to announce a minor cable-TV show.” The press conference took place in Carmel, California, at a lodge near Day’s home. A still-perky Day vamped as the reporters and film crews awaited Hudson’s arrival. He ran so late that some of the crews packed up their equipment and departed, while other reporters stayed behind in a state of extreme huff. “Their get-tough attitude soon changed. There was an audible, collective gasp--and then a hush--as Rock, his face a virtual death-mask, his body gaunt and hollow under baggy pants and jacket, was ushered into the room.” As stunned as everyone else, Day, barely missing a beat, embraced her former co-star.

Hudson filmed the show, although he was so weak they had to stop several times. Day asked him to stay in Carmel, with hopes of nursing him to health, but Hudson got on a plane to Paris for treatment, collapsing en route. It was while in Carmel that Hudson (according to the 2008 Day biography by David Kaufman) finally told his publicist he had AIDS. In Paris Hudson made the announcement of his illness.

In two months he was dead at the age of 59, and eleven days later the episode of Day's show with Hudson aired, with a tribute to Hudson (begins at 1:48):

There is something, looking back, about the way that Day was so physically affectionate and loving with Hudson that brings comfort to us watching, especially when Hudson seems so vulnerable; to the public eye, from the harsh, speculative news reports--but also with Day. (It's rather like the photos of Princess Diana with landmine victims: they end up saying more than any statements of policy.) It's almost as if he was throwing himself on public mercy as a result of a kind of blind loyalty to Day. He wasn't there to come out, but that's basically what he did. It's heartbreaking to see now--maybe it was a folly--but also, strangely, sweet. Whether he realized or cared how shocking people would find his appearance, he showed up for her. Day's version of the Gus Kahn song "My Buddy" that played during the Hudson segment of her show ultimately became "something of a standard at AIDS memorials" [Kaufman].

There are Callas people and Tebaldi people; Sarah Vaughan people and Ella Fitzgerald people; and, seemingly, Doris Day people and everybody else. People love to write her off, sneer at her, dismiss her as the meaningless, tasteless vanilla center of pop culture, but she was, and remains, a much more complicated person--and movie star--than that. I loved Elizabeth Taylor, even for some of the exact reasons that she was different than Day, but I love Doris Day too. Her role in this event in Hudson's life was accidental, ultimately--Hudson was the one risking so much, and it was his honesty that began transforming people's attitude toward the disease--but the way she handled it makes me love her. Looking back at the sometimes ghoulish footage from the event, made all the more so by the two principals perhaps not knowing what it all meant, what shines through more than 25 years later is their affection for each other.

2011-04-02T20:09:00.001-05:00

Looking at one of them with her hairy chin and general air of greyness one couldn't help thinking that this was as much a woman as a glamorous perfumed model.

Barbara Pym, A Very Private Eye

2011-04-01T14:46:00.004-05:00

"It's rather sad," she said one day, "to belong, as we do, to a lost generation. I'm sure in history the two wars will count as one war and that we shall be squashed out of it altogether, and people will forget that we ever existed. We might just as well never have lived at all, I do think it's a shame."

"It may become a sort of literary curiosity," Davey said. "…People will be interested in it for all the wrong reasons, and collect Lalique dressing-table sets and shagreen boxes and cocktail cabinets lined with looking-glass and find them very amusing."

Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love

2011-03-04T18:21:00.003-06:00

2011-02-28T12:38:00.002-06:00

2011-02-24T13:29:00.001-06:00

Barbara Berowne turned her remarkable violet-blue eyes on Dalgliesh and he was for a second disconcerted. After the first fleeting glimmer of curiosity the glance was deadened, almost lifeless, as if he were looking into coloured contact lenses. Perhaps after a lifetime of seeing the effect of her gaze she no longer needed to animate it with any expression other than a casual interest. He had known that she was beautiful, how he couldn't remember, probably it was an accumulation of casually dropped comments when her husband was talked of, of press photographs. But it wasn't a beauty to stir his heart. It would have given him pleasure to sit unnoticed and look at her as he might at a picture, to note with dispassionate admiration the delicate, perfectly curved arch above the slanting eyes, at the curve of the upper lip, the shadowed hollow between the cheekbone and the jaw, the rise of the slim throat. He could look and admire and leave without regret. For him this blond loveliness was too exquisite, too orthodox, too perfect. What he loved was a more individual and eccentric beauty, vulnerability allied to intelligence. He doubted whether Barbara Berowne was intelligent, but he didn't underrate her. Nothing in police work was more dangerous than to make superficial judgements about human beings. But he wondered briefly whether here now was a woman for whom a man would kill. He had known three such women in his career; none would have been described as beautiful.

P.D. James, A Taste for Death

2011-02-15T00:21:00.004-06:00

my ice cream bowls

2011-02-12T21:41:00.003-06:00

Two-fers.

2011-02-06T00:32:00.008-06:00

Two movie scenes where one actor visibly flinches when being kissed or hugged by another onscreen:
1. Prince kissing Wendy at the end of Purple Rain:

2. Jimmy Stewart hugging Zuzu at the end of It's a Wonderful Life:

Two actors who got worse at acting rather than better:
1. Nicolas Cage:

2. Roseanne:

Favorite characters on:
1. King of the Hill (Dale Gribble and Ted Wasonasong):

2. Shaun the Sheep (Shirley and Timmy):

Two line readings from Andie MacDowell that are really bad and should have been redone:
1. Green Card ("These people are due here any minute and you stroll around my apartment touching my things--do you realize the situation you've put me in, do you?")

2. Four Weddings and a Funeral ("Is it still raining? I hadn't noticed."); the looping in this scene makes it particularly icky.

Two unrelated things:
1. I really dislike how this extra in Groundhog Day dances. I wait for him to come on so I can hate on him:

2. I want to write a book about Paul Anthony's clothing choices in the 80s. They are the oddest hetero-gay something or other:

That's all. Goodnight!

blergh!

2011-01-10T23:02:00.010-06:00

Pursuant to my ongoing struggles with film consumption as a major movie violence-phobe, as described in this blog entry (about watching the Sopranos), and this prior entry, which details watching The Wire with the use of my friend Will's patented Cinematic Violence Guides for the Very, Very Nervous, I note that I continue, with his help, to tackle films that I've hitherto avoided completely.

To wit: I just watched No Country for Old Men, which I never thought I could do--and really probably haven't, according to some people's definitions:

Even with a Violence Guide on hand, I spent a significant amount of time hiding (behind whatever I could find), playing a few seconds of Scrabble, and hitting the photo button on my computer (hence the above) for a little audio distraction from the "click" sound, and occasionally shrinking the video screen down to two inches high then moving across the room and just listening to the movie. Oh and I made two phone calls and filed my nails.

But through it I did get, and here's Will's No Country for Old Men Violence Guide for anybody else who might suffer from the same problems I do--all five of you. My favorite phrase this time?

If anyone gets hurt in this scene, you don't see it or know it happens. I'm just noting it so you can watch it without worrying you're going to see something bad.

I find that a funny, elegant little description of the kind of ominous foreboding that usually sends me running to the next room before I can ride it out, such as the scene between Javier Bardem and the gas station clerk who doesn't quite realize that the end of his life is being toyed with, which may be the most horribly violent thing in the whole movie. I could barely sit in my seat for that.

Still to come: violence guides for a bunch more movies such as There Will Be Blood and The Ring.

2011-01-03T03:28:00.003-06:00

2010-12-14T14:57:00.001-06:00

As Christmas approached and the weather became colder, Faustina assumed her pear-shaped winter body and spent the evenings curled up in her basket by the boiler in the kitchen, while Sophia stirred various mixtures stiff with fruit and nuts and laced with brandy.

Barbara Pym, An Unsuitable Attachment

the dude's good

2010-12-10T01:12:00.043-06:00

Actors receive all kinds of Oscars. A common one these days is the Oops, Our Bad Oscar, awarded for a good performance when (more importantly) the recipient is getting up there in years and/or overdue for some general recognition and/or was snubbed embarrassingly in previous years. Jeff Bridges' 2009 Academy Award for Crazy Heart, which some claimed was that kind of classic Overdue Oscar, was actually for something else if you ask me: smoking.

There has never been a smoker like Bridges in films, and when I say that I am thinking of all film smokers and all smoking movies, from Bogie to Now, Voyager. Bridges' relationship with things he lights on fire and sticks in his mouth creates a parallel world of expression in film that he uses to great advantage and it deserves some recognition beyond the tiny gold cigarette that must be dangling from the mouth of his Oscar.

It started in his earliest work. Bridges smokes in a scene at the end of The Last Picture Show (1971) before he ships off to Korea, his uniform--and his cigarette---hinting at adulthood. Even then Bridges shows some of his classic smoking gestures, including holding his fingers close to his face and tilting his head down as he inhales.

In Starman (1984), Bridges depicts an alien come to earth who in one scene learns to smoke for the first time, (showing us, maybe, how he learned to do it) and before dissolving into a coughing jag that demonstrates the classic Bridges hollow-cheeked suck:

Among other parts in the 80s, Bridges was a post-war smoking innoventor in Tucker (1988):

before the role that I think earned him a gold medal as a movie smoker, The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), which, I'm sorry to tell the film industry, cigarette manufacturers, and my mother, made me want to smoke. I already smoked occasionally, but his character made me want to smoke better.

Taciturn, hooded-eyed pianist Jack Baker is a virtuoso smoker rendered in Bridges' naturalistic acting style, which extends into the smoking as well. Bridges is smart in that he doesn't pretend he's not smoking or minimize his movements. Nor does he try to look as if--or avoid appearing as if--he's too cool for the activity; he engages with it, looks foolish doing it on occasion, has some big gestures the way real smokers do, revels in the sensuality of what he's doing. It's subtle in human ways, not classically cinematic ones.

In The Fabulous Baker Boys he luxuriates in long, long scenes of smoking, letting it speak for him--reveling in the smoking as his character remains coldly closed off. He employs some classic Bridges stuff such as the Dangle, which should look stupid--he talks with the cigarette wobbling in his lips, his eyes screwed up against the smoke, his lower lip pushed up in a silly way to keep it there--but on Bridges doesn't:

He has a distinct way of dragging hard on a cigarette then pulling it out of his mouth at the very last minute before speaking a line to punctuate it, showing that he is thinking and paying attention, but controlling his involvement in the scene until he's ready. He keeps his fingers poised over the cigarette and very close to his mouth the whole time before quickly whipping it out to the side, speaking quietly in the space his gestures have created:

He does this constantly in Baker Boys, accompanied always by the Bridges Suck, which can look goofy or voluptuous, but is always right there in the front of his mouth:

Here it is again in Blown Away (1994):

It goes without saying that somebody who's won a Smoking Oscar has demonstrated versatility in different smoking media, such as evil cigar smoking in Iron Man (2008):

presidential smoke rings in The Contender (2000):

more period smoking in Seabiscuit (2003):

and completely convincing pot smoking (which Bridges apparently quit during production) in The Big Lebowski (1998). The scenes in which the Dude smokes do a lot to show us who this guy is. He smokes like a real pothead: with ease, without worry about how he looks or with nervous attention to paraphernalia, but with a nonetheless dogged and sometimes myopic attention.

Bridges is really good at using smoking as a signifier of dissolute characters and of vulnerability in general, such as the alcoholic ex jail-bird in American Heart (1992) (the thumb push on the bottom lip--also a Bridges move):

and in Crazy Heart, which is among other things something of a paean to smoking. It is an absolute tapestry of debauched, repetitive physical gestures. He's almost never without one:

This was the first film of Bridges' I saw that made me think: is this ultimately a (big, sophisticated, chronic) tic? A crutch? It's so distinctive, so wholesale--there is a lot of risk in doing something on such a big scale. His smoking characters smoke onscreen a lot, and it seems like there are more and more of them. It's either really convincing or the air's so thick with gestures you can't see past it.

True Grit, the Coen brothers sorta-remake with Bridges in the John Wayne role, which opens December 22, appears to be a possible apogee of Bridges' onscreen smoking. Even the trailer feels smoky, with all its grays and browns and outdoor shots and period quality:

Playing Rooster Cogburn gives him the opportunity to work an extremely boiled-down, aged, potent version of classic Bridges acting, full of vulnerabilities and gestures and (hand-rolled) cigarette smoking. I am guessing he will be great, if he doesn't tip over into growly caricature. Either way, though, it looks like Bridges' role as King of Cinesmoking is secure. No matter how you feel about smoking--it makes me ill, I'm sorry to say; my days of hoping to imitate the Bridges insouciance are long gone--he sure is good at it.

guy smiley

2010-12-02T02:07:00.024-06:00

There are a lot of things to say about the Guy Fieri Fenomenon, but the thing I'm here to get off my chest first is this: I've never seen any cooking show as heterosexual as Guy's Big Bite. The bachelor rec room feel represents a big change in the traditional pitch of cooking show atmosphere.

There are other manly cooking shows: Steven Raichlen, host of "Primal Grill," with his grindingly personality-free delivery, is very butch; super-butch, in fact, in his fire-focused cooking and constant use of Tongs. Former Idaho game warden Cee-Dub (I love Cee-Dub), king of outdoor Dutch oven cookery and practical, portable ingredients, even more so. But those shows are set outdoors, which has been the sole provenance of the manly male cooking show cook to date. Fieri's show is filmed indoors. It aggressively designs a world where the regular guy hangs with his bros but still worries about the freshness of his buffalo mozz.

"Guy's Big Bite" is actually a better show than the live audience and competition shows Fieri hosts (I cannot stand to watch those, honestly), or even Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, which features great restaurants but is severely hobbled by, well, Fieri: his constant fidgeting for the next (co-opted, outdated) catch phrase combined with lack of food vocabulary makes for a hard slog watching it, and the fact that the show is edited around him, rather than the cooks he's interviewing, is a mistake.

Regardless, the main interest "Guy's Big Bite" has to me is as a monument to heterosexual male signifiers. The set for the first season of his show was much plainer (downright cheap-looking, really, with its sponged purple walls), but as he became more famous, the kitchen grew too. In Fieri's current TV kitchen, there is: a pool table (see top photo); racing stripes on the refrigerator:

a band rig in the corner:

hub caps on the walls and motoX on the TV:

and a pinball machine:

The logo that opens the show is blocky and bold; the heavy, granite-like letters crash to the ground (yabba dabba doo):

It's all an outgrowth of Fieri's "kulinary gangsta" (™) schtick, which he works insanely hard: the guido bling, the wrist bands, the surf shirts, the Bermuda shorts, the hair, the bro patois, the sunglasses, the Sammy Hagar vibe (including the slightly mediocre, not-David Lee feel), the stadium tours, the TGIFriday's endorsement. Even Fieri's (personal) logo has an Ed Hardy flavor, as you can see here in this ad for his "Knuckle Sandwich" brand of knives, which is itself a NASCAR sponsor (I'm not sure there's ever existed a more white heterosexual male sentence in the context of cooking than that):

Although people spend a lot of time gnashing their teeth about Fieri and his blizzard of hype (I thought Anthony Bourdain's comment comparing him to Poochie the Rockin Dog was apt), "Guy's Big Bite" is actually quite conventional. Granted, sometimes the packaging obscures the content, but that's all the grown-up man toys are: packaging. The structure of his show is the same as any other. (The content really isn't that bad--if you squint through the Fieri-blah and the usual TV chef-blah, there is occasionally new information in there and some good recipes.) He gives many dishes dumb names, like "No Can Beato This Taquito" (that one might be offensive as well as dumb) or "Beef--The Bomb--Bourguignon," and makes a cocktail every episode (those always have dumb names), but his cooking style isn't notably different from anybody else's, other than in his devotion to butch squirt bottles, which never seem as carefree to use as he might like, since even with labels it can be hard to tell what's in them. His food tastes are probably too conventional and middle-class for some people; you have to wonder what Bourdain would think about this recent anti-offal quote from Fieri: "I do not appreciate the parts of the animal that had a job. Parts that are licked, make sound, push, filter, walk and so on are not for me.” But I don't think he's a bad cook.

Fieri got his start on TV as the winner of the second season of "The Next Food Network Star." The winners of the first season were Dan Smith and Steve McDonagh, a real-life couple who were more or less the opposite of the bomb-diggity het male cook, with their cozy help-me-here-a-sec-honey banter. Their show didn't take off, for what reason I don't know. I think Food Network promoted the heck out of it, but they promote Fieri harder (obviously), with a seeming glee at discovering a hitherto untapped market or at least way to pitch to it.

I do wonder what it means for cooking shows that the bar has been raised so extremely high in terms of branding--not necessarily super straight or cozy queer--but because it's so personality-driven. Bourdain complains a lot about Food Network cheese, but his network, The Travel Channel, has the same problem with its marketing, sometimes worse. Their big hitter line-up--Bourdain, Andrew Zimmern, the Man V. Food guy, whose show is all--only--personality, since it consists basically of him sitting and eating and making faces about it--all white dudes--is promoted as yeah rebellious! Their bad-ass selves! Yeah! Woo! These guys! The whole thing isn't quite as superficial as Fieri-land, but it's still heavily leveraged and all that's left over for those of us who find it artificial is Samantha Brown and the 9000th showing of thinly-vieled service pieces like "Hot Dog Paradise."

Call me crazy, but I don't think cooking is an activity organically suited to performance. The occasional burst of flame or masterful toss of contents in a skillet is immediately followed by...seven minutes of covered braising. Or washing a pan. Or peeling pounds of potatoes. Fieri occupies the most farcical end of trying to make cooking Exciting! every step of the way, but honestly I find even the less pushy versions of that kind of cooking show uninteresting, the more so the more they try. One reason that I still worship Jacques Pepin's TV cooking, where he lets La Technique speak for itself.

Guy Fieri Road Show

more than 140 characters

2010-10-27T15:31:00.000-05:00

It was the first real day-to-day meal-after-meal cooking I had ever done, and it was only a little less complicated than performing an appendectomy on a life-raft, but after I got used to hauling water and putting together three courses on a table the size of a bandana, and lighting the portable stove without blowing myself clear into the living room instead of only halfway, it was fun.

M.F.K. Fisher

rice!

2010-10-24T15:54:00.002-05:00

I am a huge fan of Lundberg rice, and have kvelled about it often. Here are two quite different but equally yummy things I made from the same pot of this rice recently.

First I cooked almost a whole package of rice in chicken stock (1:2 ratio) with a dab of butter and bit pinch of salt for about 50 minutes (I find it needs the full time + a little more, usually, including at least 10 min resting). From this sprang:

a Rarebit-like experience!

While the rice was cooking I made a sauce by first making a roux (butter, flour) then adding about 1/2 c. vermouth and cooking it furiously to get out some of the fumey alcohol. Then I added 2 c. of chicken stock and once it had come to a boil continued to add: All the Cheese I Had in the House (the remains of some grated Romano and four slices of American no judging cheese), a slug of Worchestershire, a little dry mustard, and some pepper. I also added 8 oz. of diced up ham (on sale! it was lurking in the freezer, defrosted it first). The result: a not too thick, cheesy, winey sauce with lots of ham (you can see why I didn't add salt). I served it in a big bowl over the hot rice and it was just great. It needed a fireplace to be eaten next to.

then a Salad thing!

I needed a dish for a potluck the next day, so I took the rice out of the fridge and let it come to room temperature.

For a vinaigrette in a skillet I slowly heated a handful of finely diced prosciutto in a tablespoon of olive oil and cooked until it was slightly crisp, then removed from heat, and while it was still hot (but off the heat) I added a pinch of dried thyme. Once it was cool, I add two more tablespoons of oil, the zest and juice of two lemons, a splash of rice wine vinegar, a lot of pepper, and whisked it together. (I was inspired by a friend's really great vinaigrette I had this spring, the key to which seems to be adding the lemon zest as well as the juice--so delicious.)

I quartered, lengthwise, 1-1/2 humungous hothouse cucumbers, then cut them into thin slices. I added the cukes to the rice, then to the entire mixture added the vinaigrette and tossed very thoroughly. I let it sit some more to mature, then--yum!

some foods in Vermont, sans dairy

2010-10-16T02:03:00.026-05:00

I just got back from a trip to Vermont and feel like reporting on some of the noms I had there. Not to document hidden, undiscovered gems, but to say OH! is the food good.

This blog entry is dedicated to C & C, my fearless hostess and fellow traveler on this trip, respectively, who endured constant updates about the state of my stomach--at various points empty/thrilled/wonky/cautious/needful/rhapsodic/peckish/excited/precarious/etc.--as well as other parts of me with very great good grace. Thank you.

• Fresh, very fresh, warm cider donuts and cold cider at Cold Hollow Cider Mill in Waterbury. We noodled through back roads to get there (our bleat was How Far Until Donuts?), but could smell it before we saw it. The cider donuts at Cold Hollow were small--maybe half the size of a regular donut--fragrant, not very sweet, and beautifully cooked, with crisp edges and no greasiness. The three of us got a dozen to share and then I went back for more (this will be a theme). Just wonderful. We all felt that a little sugar on the outside, dusted or in the form of a glaze, might make them even better, but I also wondered if there was something I didn't know about how or when these donuts would be eaten best. I think if you had them on a freezing Vermont morning with nothing else yet in your stomach, you might not want the sugar. Not sure. But they were delicious, regardless; yeasty but substantial, a nice donut texture compromise, and the cold cider was great. Tourist quotient was high at this place, but not too bad. Because we were there the week before Columbus Day, apparently the busiest time of the year in Vermont for visiting by the leafer/peeper types, we dodged a lot of tour buses, but it wasn't too bad.

• We stopped for maple syrup and Creemees, Vermont's version of soft-serve ice cream, at the Morse Farm sugar house in Montpelier. Like a good foodie I bought some Grade B (haven't tried it yet), then had a lick of my friend's Creemee that was both made with maple syrup and had a maple flavoring dusted on the outside. I have to say the lick was amazing. I didn't have enough to compare its consistency and flavor to non-Vermont soft-serve, but it was grand. The maple kettle corn was pretty good, but not salty sweet enough to make it crazy addicting.

• The P&H Truck Stop in Wells River was spectacularly good. I had the meatloaf special. I don't often have or crave meatloaf, so I felt as if I were throwing myself on their culinary mercy a bit, especially as a picky eater, but it was a good gamble to take and not really much of one in the end. 'Cause they know what they're doing. The high, squishy P&H dinner roll is unbelievably good. I want one now. And the meatloaf...I chased after every last crumb, which you don't always want to do with dried-out meatloaf edges, only theirs wasn't dried out at all. The gravy (I needed extra) was dark and savory, amazing on the buttered homemade bread and rolls and with coleslaw on the side. Honestly, the whole experience is kind of a fog, it was so good. I got my dessert to go and had it a couple days later, and I don't think I've ever had such good chocolate cream pie. People don't usually take this dessert very seriously, I find, especially as a medium of chocolate conveyance. There are so many other ways to have chocolate, and people seem to want other flavors for their pie. But this one was deep, rich chocolate. Love.

• You can't talk about food in Vermont without noting the free sample at the Ben & Jerry's Factory Tour in Waterbury. And it was really good, in fact: Mint Chocolate Chunk, which the tour guide told me was an old B&J flavor, but as a major mint & chocolate hound I know I've never seen it. I should have questioned him further. (Now I am wondering: was it a dream?) I chewed up some Lactaid tablets (terrible without water) and ate only half my sample. I spent a lot of time cynically pondering the nature of the B&J experience while I was there--the branding is so thorough and the way they position themselves as bumbling yet sincere is so clever but not too clever-clever--but none of it really mattered when I was licking my ice cream.

• Must note: really good pizza from Leonardo's in South Burlington, whose grand crust is made with King Arthur Flour, bringing us to:

• The King Arthur Flour Baker's Store & Cafe in Norwich, which on a beautiful sunny day was such a happy place. As a person on a budget, shopping at the store was an extremely clamped-down and careful experience (I could not resist these chocolate sprinkles), but the bakery in store is gorgeous. I don't know that I've ever seen such solidly beautiful baked goods. We sampled basics. Their croissant was extremely flaky, but not papery or dry; the layers smushed together when you bit into it in that good buttery way that real croissants do. The challah was delicious, the rich brownie so deep brown it was almost black, and my friend assures me the eclair was the real thing. It was a little painful to be in that store and not more engaged in baking-related commerce (someday-I'll-get-a-stand-mixer), but it was inspiring.

• Hostess-C & I found Curtis' BBQ in Chester after stopping at the Vermont Country Store in Rockingham (I did not long to buy much there, even after a lifetime of perusing their catalogs, although I would really like Mountain Weave tablecloths and napkins someday). At that point we were both fed up with sugar and twitzy-twee and longing for protein, and turned into Curtis' lot, nudged by no less than God, I think, via our growling stomachs and a traffic jam that slowed us down to see the Curtis' sign and smell the outdoor smokers. We sat in the quiet pre-dinner rush restaurant and worked our way through a pile, a downright pile, of lean but juicy pulled chicken (for me) and pulled pork (for C). We chatted with the waitress and owner, who is Curtis' daughter, and watched as the restaurant cat sniffed our car. I got some extra honey BBQ sauce on the side for my chicken. It was so, so great. Curtis' calls itself "the 9th Wonder of the World"--yay for BBQ in VT.

• We visited the Lake Champlain Chocolates factory in Burlington. Twice. Oh sweet lordy jebus. I don't know how to keep this short. Their chocolates are astonishing, and there was not a ding on them, not the slightest bit out of place on each integral piece: no bloom, no dullness, no chalkiness; all glossy dark shine and snap and full sweet scent. I am a huge fan of their hazelnut 5-Star Bar and was sad not to find any in their seconds bins, but did manage to get some beautiful mint coins and milk chocolate bonbons on sale. Also tried and loved: their Legendary Dark truffle, the Dark Chocolate Almond Caramel Clusters, and Milk Chocolate Pecan Caramel Clusters. I got some dark and milk chocolate chips for baking and cannot wait to see how some oatmeal cookies made with them turn out. Their chocolate is really, really good.

• One of our last days there we visited Shelburne Farms, petting the goats and calves, chasing the fluffy fretful chickens, soaking up the architecture and the setting. The place is beautiful and strangely intact: 3,800 acres of gentleman's farm built by a member of the Vanderbilt family in 1885 with $10 million (that's 1885 dollars). I have never seen farm buildings on so big and artistic a scale. Beautifully detailed but clean-lined, sort of Richardsonian, farm buildings blown up to a gargantuan size, in a gorgeous palette of dark, natural colors, traced against the greens and oranges of this Vermont valley. It's amazing and almost fantastical. And the parts of the farm on the shore of Lake Champlain are even more magical. Luxurious in the strangest, most practical way.

The three of us were hungry after frolicking in the petting zoo (more perfection: we were visited by a naughty escaped Corgi while looking at the pigs!) and stopped by the little store in their cheesemaking facility and then the organic bakery. We sat in the car by the lake, wind-waves crashing, and ate one of those magical unplanned meals: fresh, chewy ciabatta, bottles of cold cider, chunks of farm sausage, and two-year-old cheddar cheese. I had avoided cheese most of the trip, but let myself taste some here and felt it melt on my tongue: sweet, really sweet, but tangy and sharp as hell, thick and milky. All so good, and I am very lucky.

2010-09-26T14:42:00.007-05:00

It is pure pleasure to listen to Ms. Fitzgerald turn this song on its ear in all its lugubrious glory.

Reverse Strawberry Margarita!

2010-09-24T21:21:00.001-05:00

The fruit IS the ice cubes. And it's not really a margarita.

Macerate one quart of hulled strawberries in citrus (around the juice of two limes) and a tablespoon of sugar overnight, at least, stirring occasionally. Drink the delicious liquid that formed, then puree the fruit in a blender until it's as smooth as you can make it. Freeze in a somewhat shallow container.

For the drink:

Chip off several big chunks of strawberry puree and fit into a tall glass until full. Add:

- one big shot of blueberry vodka
- one big shot of grenadine
- top off with tonic water and a twist of lime.

Add a straw, and mash the melting strawberry chunks into your drink as you go.

2010-09-24T20:53:00.001-05:00

The crotch is the danger area. A good gusset is half the battle. There's nothing so horrible as a baggy gusset--short legs, voluminous ball-room--except a tight one that splits.

Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean

Facing the Music

FACT.

2010-09-23T16:54:00.003-05:00

The best movies use pink lettering in their title sequences.

pommes anna

2010-09-23T13:42:00.004-05:00

the quest for perfection continues, despite an uneven burner

hints from lizoise

2010-09-22T15:49:00.007-05:00

1. Cocoa is tenacious, smeary powder and hard to get out of the container when you get to the dregs. The best way to do it? Add a big spoonful of granulated sugar, put the top back on, and shake vigorously, letting the sugar rub away at the cocoa. Dump the (now brown) sugar out, and repeat again as necessary, using the cocoa-ed sugar to make (for instance) cocoa!

2. This is what you need to clean your computer keyboard: STIM-U-DENTS. Trust me. They are genius.

They are made from squishy balsa wood, with an elongated triangular point, which makes them ideal for attacking the between-key spaces from many angles and for buffing away layers of grime. They are cheap, so you can use as many of them as necessary. And the wood is absorbent, which allows them to attract hairs and crumbs. They are a great thing to have near your computer for when you're staring out the window or something and can idly clean away.

on being on hold

2010-09-22T15:29:00.001-05:00

It is all very well to take a firm line about things, and rush to the telephone, determined to "do something" without delay; other people do not sit with folded hands waiting upon the convenience even of our highly interesting and influential selves. Harriet laughed at her own annoyance. She had made up her mind to instant action, and now she was furious because a business firm had affairs of its own to attend to. Yet to wait any longer was impossible.

Gaudy Night

martha/alexis axis

2010-09-18T15:00:00.010-05:00

Oh the psychology to feast on in Martha Stewart-world. Her recent home decorating issue is so full of Freud and meaning it's like a novel.

I would like to take this moment, though, to comment on one aspect of the Martha/Alexis (her daughter) dynamic. Not via Whatever! TV/radio, which I can't watch/listen to (don't have the right cable station or Sirius), but honestly don't think I'd want to, anyhow. Only so much meta-Martha I can take.

There is this idea that Alexis says what Martha is really thinking, but when you look at their blogs--which, while spun, do reveal a closer/more real-time look at their lives--it's more than that: Alexis's life looks like the phantom life being lived in the world of Martha Stewart Living. Martha's doesn't.

Alexis' blog is full of photos of baked goods she makes for other people--tons every month. And food she cooks, cleaning and organizing she does (in her multi-unit Richard Meier apartment). Here are a few photos from her blog of pie-making and the cake she made for Martha's birthday:

Martha's blog is full of travel photos from speaking engagements and corporate meetings, and photos of other people working for her on her properties. When she posts photos from her home, she is often filming for the show:

I'm generalizing, but still. It does strike one. It makes me think a bit of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, where the daughter had something to do with the mother's creation as a writer/public figure and with her positioning and the chicken and the egg and all that. Not sure what exactly came first.

somewhat successful chicken chili

2010-09-03T17:28:00.003-05:00

Cooked 1-1/2 c. barley in combination of chicken stock and pureed tomatoes and chili spices until done. Near end added one can of pureed black beans and one can whole rinsed black beans. Added cooked diced chicken. Served with brown bread and bits of cheese leftovers. Ate for next 390827345 days.

extremely successful hashbrowns

2010-09-01T18:51:00.006-05:00

Made with a small handful of cubed Abraham prosciutto and leftover Yukon Golds that were originally baked, then peeled, then mashed a little bit of butter. Hashbrowns were cooked for that interminable amount of potato time in non-stick pan--maybe an hour or more, as crusts formed and were turned under. Yum!

I like chihuahuas and Chinese noodles

2010-08-20T17:00:00.012-05:00

A portion of my current musical identity is tightly bound up in early music by the B52s. It is great! I can't stop listening. And it repays. This is a nourishing hit-play-over-and-over obsession.

I get Cindy Wilson, now, by the way. I didn't before. I was always a Kate Pierson person--still am--but I didn't really get why Cindy was revered. She stood out much less strongly to me, somehow, including in her looks. But now I totally get it. That long-necked slinky slightly tortured Southern gothic girl-group extremely talented warbley vibratoed thing she has.

(clockwise: "Dirty Back Road," "Give Me Back My Man," "Song for a Future Generation," and "Downtown" at the Downtown Cafe in Athens in 1978 ...click pix for video links)

2010-07-25T14:37:00.004-05:00

At Halcyon Hill a dying sun slipped behind the trees as Frannie strolled in the garden with her only confidante.

"I don't know what's happened to Edgar," she said, sipping disconsolately at her Mai Tai. "He used to care about things...about us... You know, it's funny, but when Eddie was in France during the war, I used to miss him terribly. He wasn't with me, but he was, you know... Now he's with me, but he's not...and goddammit, I like missing him the other way more!"

Her eyes were brimming with tears now, but she didn't brush them away. She was lost in another time, when loneliness wasn't barren but beautiful, when snapshots and love letters and the honeyed voice of Bing Crosby had eased her gently through the most difficult winter of her life.

But now it was summer, and Bing lived just over the next hill. Why hadn't things worked out?

Tales of the City

yummers summers

2010-07-19T18:18:00.004-05:00

Quinoa, cucumber and chicken salad, in a dressing made from homemade pesto, mayo and lime juice. When the quinoa was just off the heat I stirred in pesto and let it absorb during the resting process.

Fresh strawberry smoothie made with frozen blueberries and peaches, wheat germ, flax seed, splash of lemonade.

emoticon economics

2010-07-15T00:30:00.049-05:00

I have been thinking a lot recently about smiley face inflation. What will happen when it reaches a panicked peak? Will there be long lines before work to buy attention and happiness? Hoarding? The shoe leather cost of new parentheses and semi-colon keys?

Sometimes these days the absence of emoticons has more meaning than their presence. Plain text can have an air of seriousness or impersonality without them, no matter what's being said, or how. With so very much text being flung back and forth--so many words--the stakes continue to be ratcheted up fast. What will happen when we expect smileys in everything but legal documents? (Can you imagine the blizzard of smilies a divorce decree--for example--would require if people's real "feelings" were expressed in them that way?) How much umbrage and misunderstanding? Confusion? Extra extra extra long messages? Will written sarcasm and irony fade out, frustrated at being taken at face value without the soundtrack of smiley faces to point us toward our proper reactions to it?

I once idly asked a friend who uses smiley faces a lot what it "meant" in her case--what she generally intended with them (I don't mean in individual cases, which I tend to overanalyze, but as a general gesture). It turns out I was entirely wrong in how I had guessed them, despite knowing this friend pretty well. Despite knowing this friend in strong part through written communication. I could see it--I could see all the acres of textual communication between us and how the smileys had varyingly colored communication depending on a thousand different things, as a kind of vague congenial buttressing, but that how they were sent was not necessarily how they were received. Which is no different from words--you can't control how they get read--but emoticons are a different kind of communication lubricant. They sort of ease the transmission of words from one person to another, diffuse conflict.

But words aren't easy things. They're words. I was recently reading a stream of my Facebook posts and noted how the smiley faces in them read afterward: they read like nothing. They looked gratuitous. They didn't even particularly impart an air of amiability. They were just filler. They reminded me of bad performances in good movies that don't seem so bad first time around, because you're just trying to understand what's going on--later you realize just how bad they were. Words are still much more powerful creatures than emoticons once any immediacy in communication is over.

But when the immediacy is there and with smiley inflation ever-growing... I don't know! Stock up, I guess.

one more

2010-07-09T00:30:00.010-05:00

It's when the bones in a lady's boobs--they get sore. Because the vaginalistic cells are expanding. Whammy! You girls, you talk about it a lot and I know it's your little friend. And then you gotta wear protection. And then the belly button is inflamed and then engorging of the fall-a-cule. And then nine months later is the miracle of life.

drinkin likka

2010-07-08T23:50:00.013-05:00

It's good to have a drinks cabinet. It's a nice part of the adult idiom, a well-stocked bar with a modicum of proper equipment and some good, basic liquors. I used to tell people that the reason I moved downtown was too many Doris Day movies: I wanted to come home from a busy day at work, toss off the jacket from my tailored suit, sigh, and step to my view of the city with a drink in hand I'd mixed at my chic drinks caddy. I'm not sure I've achieved any of that, down to not making the best use of my liquor tray, but I still think it's important to have one. Here are some things mine include:

Dregs of good stuff from various guests
A Popener brought back by a friend from Rome
Gold tequila that really needs to be turned into a punch or something, to make room for a better kind
Vermouth--very good to have on hand for cooking when you're not good at having an open wine bottle in the fridge door
Pimm's No. 1. Absolute necessity.
Back-up bottle of Pimm's.
Rose's Lime Juice, which is key for a Raymond Chandler gimlet, but also turns out to be handy to have around for culinary purposes (I have thrown splashes into salad dressings and smoothies when no fresh citrus is available)
Hendrick's Gin...great stuff
A beautiful bottle of Death's Door gin, which I won as a prize this week! (more on how and where soon)

There are other things lurking on the tray, like a jigger, a nice drink shaker, bitters, and Grenadine, and the whole thing gives me a nice feeling of satisfaction to look at, to know I can make a drink when I need to. Still working on the other Doris accoutrements.

2010-07-06T13:58:00.005-05:00

nettflixx

2010-07-06T00:00:00.014-05:00

This little message from Netflix is meant, I guess, to make us feel excited about the world of unseen films waiting on their website, but it's awfully bald. It gives me a jolt every time I see it, down to the period at the end of the declarative sentence that lends it an air of creepy control rather than happy advertising urging us toward something.

Your taste preferences make movie discovery easy EVERY CLICK YOU MAKE WE'LL BE WATCHING YOU • WE PLANT COOKIES IN YOUR BROWSER WHERE THEY HIDE AND REPORT BACK • WE CAN DIVINE YOUR TASTE BY SIMPLY LOOKING OVER YOUR SHOULDER...blah blah. It would be scarier if Netflix weren't often wrong about its guesses, though. BASED ON YOUR INTEREST IN [some crap I clicked in a fit of boredom or research] WE SUGGEST [some similar crap that makes me recoil in horror]...blah blah. Sometimes Netflix is "right" about one's taste, but the whole thing is a crude enough mechanism that it all feels less Borg than it might. But still.

Computer dating sucks, man! We didn't have anything in common.

it's too hot

2010-07-05T17:54:00.015-05:00

Here's what I want.

In a clearing in an easy, un-scary forest, at night: a deep, wide hole is carved in the packed dark earth, done carefully and slowly so no trees' roots are jarred and none of the dense earth shifts too much. Some kind of nice clean insulation and squishy packing is added, and on top of that is installed a temperature-maintaining and completely moisture-impermeable liner, extremely thick, with handy ridges for sitting and climbing built into it. I'm picturing this hole about 8 feet across and about 12 feet deep.

The construction of this hole--a very large cup buried in the earth, basically--is as solid as it can be, with a wide plinth and paving around it that prevents any dirt from entering. There are kerosene lamps all around casting a nice glow; not creepily flickering against the trees, just nice.

Then a very clean tanker from the Schweppes factory arrives, full of sparkly carbonated water and gallons of it are siphoned into the earth-cup, until it's about 2/3 full. The delivery person hands me a can of ginger ale and a straw and leaves. Another truck comes with some very large ice cubes, maybe a foot square, and 5 or 6 of them are dropped in. That delivery person leaves.

I throw every single thing I'm wearing on the wide sturdy bench nearby and drop naked into the cup with a deep splash, which creates a big disturbance in the water, but doesn't overflow much. I bob out to reach my ginger ale, open it, put the straw in it. A giant hand reaches in and with its finger sets all the contents of the earth-cup aspin--me and cubes and sparkly water. I don't know how I'll get out, but that's where I want to be.

vegetable love

2010-07-05T16:41:00.010-05:00

These bags come with ridiculous packaging and promises, and make you feel like a sucker for buying anything with AS SEEN ON TV on the outside, but they work. Especially in this season when it feels like (as MFK Fisher would say) we are eating produce a few minutes faster than it can rot. I haven't used them for fruit much, just veg, but I love the little reprieve they buy me so I can count on my cucumber a few days longer, or my lettuce. Not nearly as many fearful discoveries in the sometimes scary Produce Drawers of the fridge. Less limp, wet, rotting; more eaty. Yay.

Thank you, CMT!

gianduuuuuuuuuuja

2010-06-29T21:00:00.014-05:00

I saw these at my local fancypants emporium last year on the checkout impulse shelf and bought one--mostly because of its lovely appealing chunky shape. They were an amazing find ('find')--unbelievably good! I tried a few flavors, but rapidly realized it has to be hazelnut for me.

It turns out (whoknewnotI) these bars are discussed in Steve Almond's Candy Freak in some detail (and are on his top 5 list), down to their brilliant inclusion of feuilletine in the body of the bar. They do have the most amazing texture; the inside is creamy and praline-like, but studded with nuts and bits of crisp that give under the teeth. The outside is really smooth with some snap. They are just the most amazing little bars. I notice that they disappear the fastest of all five flavors!

literary flutterings & a persistent li'l question

2010-06-29T01:26:00.031-05:00

I find hot weather the time to reread the Mapp and Lucia books by E.F. Benson. They don't all take place in the summer, but there is something about this time of the year that pushes them to the front of the mind: iced red-currant fool and strawberry teas and bitter gardening feuds; Lucia's giardino segreto and Georgie calling "naughty boy" through the speaking tube to his chauffeur on his trips to the beach.

So this is when I reach for the six novels, which were published in omnibus form as Make Way for Lucia. Edward Gorey, called "America's chief Luciaphile" by editor Patrick O'Connor (Gorey brought to his attention the short story "The Male Impersonator," which has been included in subsequent editions of the omnibus), said among many mentions of Benson in interviews, "I know the Lucia books by E.F. Benson by heart." They are that kind of reading.

People blah-blah a lot about the atmospheric self-contained worlds novels create we want to be part of, but part of the appeal of these books is that the characters don't want to be anywhere else themselves. They are obsessed with life and gossip in their small towns, all out of proportion to the world around them. "'And how was London?'" asks Lucia's husband in the first book, "in the sort of tone in which he might have inquired after the health of a poor relation, who was not likely to recover." Lucia goes on in the second book to conquer a bemused London with her foaming, naked, social-climbing, but even then Riseholme, the Elizabethean village where she lives, wins in the end, in its bid for our (and her) attention.

"Rationally, it ought to grow dull, but it doesn't," says Philip Hensher in an essay about the social war (there's no other word) between Lucia and Miss Mapp that takes place on the battlefield of these small English towns. Nancy Mitford writes in her introduction to the omnibus: "The jokes seem quite obvious and are often repeated: we can never have enough of them....It never, never palls." I'm not sure the jokes are obvious, but either way the writing is so masterful that I feel breathless waiting for each bit to arrive, all these rereadings later. Mapp and Lucia don't even meet until the fourth book; Benson spends as much time creating the characters on their own as putting them in conflict, and it is a tribute to his writing ability that every book is as exciting as the other, and that the conflict is as delicious as you hope.

(Some random-randoms: the comic novelist Tom Holt wrote two well-regarded 'sequels' to the Mapp & Lucia books, and is the son of Hazel Holt, the mystery novelist and Barbara Pym biographer.)

Here's what I want to know: Who is the Anne Parrish who wrote the foreword to Make Way for Lucia? I've been trying to find an answer to this for a long time.

It seems likely that the Anne Parrish in question is the American novelist of that name, but nothing has ever linked the two definitively that I can find. Parrish the novelist died in 1957; as far as I can tell the first time an omnibus edition was published was in 1977. It doesn't seem like the foreword was from earlier editions of single books since it mentions them all being collected together. She writes in it about visiting Benson at his home in Rye, which obviously would have had to be prior to his death in 1940.

More random-randoms: Anne Parrish was the older brother of Dillwyn Parrish, M.F.K. Fisher's second husband, which is how my ears pricked up in the first place about all this (rabid MFKery). Parrish traveled a lot, and was quite wealthy, so it doesn't seem improbable that she would have visited Benson (she also was an owner of Le Paquis, the property in Switzerland where Fisher and Parrish lived before the war). A very tenuous connection could lie in Benson's familiarity with Maxfield Parrish (Anne Parrish was a distant cousin and posed as a child for some of his work).

Anyhow...anybody know? Someone apparently forwarded my query to Patrick O'Connor a while ago, but I haven't heard anything. Perhaps his introduction to the Moyer Bell reissue of Queen Lucia or his memoir Don't Look Back clears it up? Maybe I'm missing something really obvious. Me curious!

Note: 2010, the 70th year since Benson's death, is also the jubilee year for the E.F. Benson Society, and there are a few events coming up for members, if you can get yourself to England.

UPDATE: Per a helpful member of a Benson group, I found out that there was a 1936 American omnibus edition of the (then) four Lucia novels published called All About Lucia, and Parrish's foreword first appears there. So indeed it very likely might have been Anne Parrish the novelist who wrote the foreword! Thanks Friends-of-Fred!

2010-06-26T23:26:00.021-05:00

RON: An astute observation has led to laughter! We are laughing! And it is continuing. And then slowing just down a little. But there's still a good spirit.

BRIAN: Yeah, we got it, Ron.

RON: It's getting less. And there's a little chuckle. And...it's done.

BRIAN: You really wreck moments when you do that, Ron.

rod the bod

2010-06-22T14:00:00.029-05:00

Do you remember when Rod betrayed us all and flipped? Came out with "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" I don't. Well, kinda--I remember it vividly, but I had no clue what was going on. It's one of my first memories of some kind of big cultural reaction--a sense that something had gone Wrong. I think the way he now is systematically working his way through every song ever written might be more of a problem, but in any case it is pure pleasure to discover more of the Faces years.

I'm totally in love with "Bad 'n' Ruin," and not just because I am a sucker for good drum breaks. Click here for a Top of the Pops version (with Ron Wood on ugly toilet guitar, complete with dangling paper) that is nonetheless damn cool. I love what Rod does with the mic stand during the drum break. I could watch the two-second bit where he does that over and over all day. I love that the song sounds raunchy but is so sad. And funky. I've always liked "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" too, actually. It has a cool sad feel--musically, at least. I like the wobbly but persistent bass line. But it's hard to watch Rod shaking his shiny butt, his hair blonder, wooing his lady bar-friend and all officially Sexy. Sheds a little light on the aghast reaction at the time.

Date Night

2010-06-22T00:00:00.058-05:00

I saw this movie. Voluntarily! I needed to see a movie, so I saw it, a month or so after it came out. I got through it fine. It went down okay.

I find something persistently, finally, synecdochic in this film. The characters in Date Night stand in for our experience--the viewers' experience--with the movie itself, and for all of us in our experiences with shitty popular culture.

The crazy adventure plot that married suburbanites Tina Fey and Steve Carell are thrust into isn't just dumb, it's amateurish. The mistaken identity story is holey and thin--set pieces strung together--and gets especially preposterous toward the end. There is a mobster named "Joe Miletto" whose name gets repeated oft and loud they way they do in a 22-minute sitcom to get you to quickly understand it's somebody important ("You don't know ____? He's only the ____-est thing since [real person _______ is modeled after]!"). There is an expensive pointless car-chase scene that justifies Date Night's existence as a feature film and not a TV pilot. The corrupt cops (oh Common) glower menacingly. There are blackmail photos and helicopters on rooftops and a strip club...whatever. It's a joke.

So, the movie's mostly bad, but that's not the problem or a surprise: it's the good parts that worry. Fey and Carrell, never movie star types in the traditional sense--that's their schtick, in this film and out of it--can be funny and even subtle at times. Their characters are limned against the obviousness and stereotypes around them, but not with a smug superiority all ready to be smashed: they can be goofy and vulnerable. They sneak a cell phone pic with Will.i.am; Fey reveals a silly crush on Mark Wahlberg's character. The scene in the strip club is a classic Fey gag: they make it clear they know what this is all about ("Work that pole like a runaway," she tells her husband) before fake pole-dancing badly, unsexily. They sort of take the edge off how stupid the plot is by nudging collective cultural thinking at the same time.

But why are they there at all? The funny and redeemable parts of this film occur because they're trapped in it, but they're not Ted Knight, sputtering with impotent snobbery in a captain's hat; they're us. Kind of. (Not really. But you know what I mean.) And they are complicit in the crap around them. They're in this 88-minute cage of their salary. They're smart and the movie's dumb.

Good actors have always been thrust in bad movie vehicles, winking at the audience about it with varying success, so that isn't so remarkable. The reason Date Night stands out is because of the unusually strong contrast between a film that feels like it is not even trying and characters who are in many ways a construct of our media sophistication. This movie is redeemed by occasional observational (and improvised) humor that with just a slight change in focus would take it apart.

That feels familiar, somehow, in ways that aren't just about movie plots. It feels like the flow of information around us, where the intelligent dialogue sometimes seems like it only happens on some removed level. The stakes are higher, and the discussion gets smarter (sometimes) and more short-handed (always), and in the meantime...junk is everywhere. We pick and choose what we want from the huge flow of information--too much, maybe--but that doesn't mean we really avoid the idiotic crap in the end. It all comes up in the net.

Date Night is only a bad movie, made by a director who specializes in these kinds of bad movies (Night at the Museum hurt) and I just used the word "limn," which makes me feel a little dirty. Also: this much vague but crippling cynicism is not flattering, and I apologize for that. But this movie seems to be a symbol of how bad movies can be at the same time they know they are, and that feels familiar and wrong.

cat No. 1

2010-06-17T14:53:00.024-05:00

Ursula the cat is a combination in her personality and physical particulars of:

black bear cub (hence the name)
andiron
West Highland terrier (fat tail)
otter
oversized muff for spoiled cold-weather child royalty
bulldog (broad chest)
baby harbor seal
medicine ball
Schmoo
little kid with licked finger ready to Wet Willy
duck (quacking meows)
scaredy cat
elephant knocking down fences by scratching back against them
Baby Huey
bowling ball
thug
inconveniently placed bearskin rug
(etc.)

She is also a large percentage mink. She has lush, soft, thick, minky, ripply, chocolate-brown fur whose true color emerges only in strong direct sunlight--the rest of the time it looks black. Late spring/summer evenings are good for spotting it. A big fat mink.

life during NRFU

2010-06-15T17:18:00.008-05:00

With national census clean-up efforts winding down, I don't think I'm telling any tales out of school to mention what I found to be the most difficult aspect of employment as an enumerator: the serifs on the letter I.

The correct way to fill out forms, according to the Enumerator Manual (from which these images are scanned) is with horizontal lines at the top and bottom of the I. It is, however, the only letter you print with serifs.

It made me nuts every time I had to do it. Which was often. It slowed me down, it hurt, it made my brain bleed. It looked terrible. It threw an immediate monkey wrench into the x-height you were maintaining in your head and awkwardly cramped down the "I," the letter buckling between the serifs like a vise. No serif - no serif - no serif - no seriffffffffff...oh no, SERIF. I need a cocktail. Bad, wrong, bad. WRONG. Regroup, start writing again--fuck. Another I. Misery. I believe at some point during training I actually raised my hand to complain about the serifs, in a fit of anguished design nerdery.

According to the Census the serifs are there for purposes of optical scanning, to distinguish it from the number 1, but I suspect lazy reasoning there. Why are there no O/0 problems then? There has to be some contextual reading to distinguish those. So why burden your poor employees with the agonies of the extra lines? Sigh.

tatters

2010-06-09T18:16:00.009-05:00

It is my experience that the natural death of many pieces of clothing, while expected, tends to be nonetheless quite violent and quick.

My favorite--no, only--bathrobe died today. But it didn't just wear into gentle holes: I put it on and it looked like squirrels had had a fight in it. There were several large jagged thready rents in it--big ones--I had never seen before; big holes with the weft fibers hanging in drooped swags like the windows at the Four Seasons. The cuffs were suddenly strangely unraveled. The hem had blown.

It's as if the wardrobe person for Les Mis snuck in overnight and customized it so I could play a street urchin or something. It almost looks fake. Funny how that happens. Time for a new bathrobe.

romans à clef

2010-06-08T21:43:00.011-05:00

I have this nagging feeling that there is something to be explored in how movies address the process of writing with regard to women authors. Most every time I watch a movie with a woman writing in it I get a *ping* of cinematic recognition at the sight of her making sausage of her life for fiction. Apparently it's as simple as writing it all down!

It seems like there is this trope of the female author just transferring (painful events from) her life to paper. Bing bang boom. Writing! As in Something's Gotta Give, the most flat-out example of it I can think of, when Diane Keaton turns her life into a play. Or in Little Women, where Jo recycles the plot of the movie for a book called Little Women.

I need to see Becoming Jane. And re-watch Angel at my Table and Henry & June and others--see how this idea lives. Because it's certainly something that happens to writers in movies in general, in some ways. Movies want a strong through line from cause (life) to effect (art). It makes more 'sense' that way.

But...I dunno. There's this Thing, this sentimental Thing, where women writers in film are conduit pipes only for the art that plops out the other end. It has an odd feeling, as if they weren't capable of anything else? Or needed, artistically, for anything else?

2010-06-08T21:12:00.000-05:00

These turned out great. Still not totally sure why milk chocolate, though.

How to Get From Point A to Point B During a Chicago Parade, Part II

2010-06-01T15:10:00.003-05:00

For Part I, see here.

2010-06-01T12:00:00.004-05:00

I used to find the elasticity of time scary. The things you learn in physics class: the theory of relativity and all the ways in which time and space gets bendy. That stuff is easier to digest now, though, and I find it instead funnier and scarier how it is that time plods. Part of time's tyranny is that it's one second--whatever--at a time. It's liquid because it plods. Can't stop it, cant start it, can't change it.

It is weird--exhilarating--disgusting--cool--scary--funny--to discover more and more as I get older that truly nothing is ever done but one thing at a time.

We multi-task, we put our heads in the sand, we fly along when things are good, time grinds by when things are awful, the trip back from somewhere is faster than the way there, but basically it's one thing at a time. Always one thing at a time.

So that means:

- thinking about the idea of running a marathon
- putting one step in front of the other during training for a marathon
- watching a movie about marathon runners
- putting one step in front of the other during your first marathon
- worrying about your ability to run a marathon
- watching marathon runners go by from your car
- putting one step in front of the other during your 12th marathon
- sadly fingering a trophy for winning a marathon and wondering if you'll do it again
- painting a fugly LeRoy Nieman ripoff of marathon runners

etc.

...all happens one thing at a time, every one of those. That fact's really scarier to me than donut holes in the time-space continuum. But there is also a lot of possibility in it.

2010-05-28T17:30:00.014-05:00

These posters on bus stops are still making me chortle hard. The cheese! The cheese.

The hair is intense and a unique (to me) aesthetic combination of: decent actor with enough boxoffiss drag to make inevitable, embarrassing big budget career choice--with cut abs; romance novel; video game; generalized period piece with strappy leathery stuff; as well as very Young Adult novel, in regards to the feathery side bits all adrift in the wind.

His accent (equally hilarious) seems to be basically that of English Actor Cast in Period Film, whose tones lends a certain veracity (to Americans) to the general Periodyness of it all. Woo! Persia!

2010-05-28T11:36:00.001-05:00

It occurs to me that being an otter phlebotomist would be a rather onerous occupation, although you would probably have the skills as a result to do absolutely anything. (Why always with the cheese music scoring otter videos? If I had a sense the otters gave a shit, I would imagine them coming back in another life to wreak vengeance on those who soundtrack their lives with such cutesie-pie crap.)

so immature

2010-05-21T14:38:00.011-05:00

It turns out that the sexiest album I own may be Dr. Andrew Weil's Breathing: The Master Key to Self-Healing. The deep rumbling masculine voice with its overlay of Jersey/PA ("find" is "foind"), the "ins" and "outs," the fluttering diaphragms, the whooshy background breathing that reminds me a little of a Teena Marie song, the "stimulating breath" that "increases warmth," tongues all over your mouth, the universe playfully breathing air into you...it's an intense aural experience. Makes a girl giggle and toss her curls.

Ottoman out!

2010-05-20T21:00:00.013-05:00

Is there anything more luxurious than the modern practice of building up then satisfying that over-excited urge for the Next Episode of something? We're lucky--we're really lucky. Not just that we get to take in big gulps of well-written long episodic stories as much as/as fast as we want, no waiting til next week, no commercials, no agonized anticipation, but that there's just so much of it. The world really wants us to be entertained. Distracted. Drooling in front of a rectangle. Whatever. Hours and hours of stuff.

(I think it's a luxury--sometimes I wonder. Sometimes that excruciating can't-wait-til-next-week feeling is a good thing. You can get kind of numb or sick to your stomach from too much episodic stuff sometimes.)

I've been really enjoyin Arrested Development, which I mainlined through Netflix streaming. It's great, it's fun, there are things that make me bark out loud with laughter. I do think the female casting is weak, in a way I associate in my head with the talent level of the Imagine people involved: funny, risk-taking, interesting, but also kind of Hollywood. Portia de Rossi is a weak link in that cast, and Charlize Theron was pretty awful; the show bounced back up noticeably high as soon as that plotline was over (it was a decent goofy premise--at least the Americans thinking everything Brits say is intelligent bit--and I don't think she pulled it off). And I wish they would have let the show have more of an arc with set design--letting the show home disintegrate around Bluths, or be customized as the series went on, rather than just little nods to it, like the fake turkey that would show up over and over. That seemed less like surreality and more like a missed opportunity. But still, totally fun.

2010-05-18T17:54:00.013-05:00

JACK: You do not want to miss this wedding. It's going to be New York royalty: the Astors, the Rockefellers. The Sbarros.

AVERY: Yes, I know, Jack--you think I don't want to know what Pizzerina Sbarro is going to be wearing?

JACK: Then come.

AVERY: We both know that is a bad idea, which is why I scheduled a conflict I can't get out of.

JACK: What is it?

AVERY: Well, if you must know, I'm on Dodecacil. The pill where you only get your period once a year.

JACK: We're so close to beating that thing completely.

And then...

2010-05-18T14:00:00.022-05:00

Why do semi-failed culinary efforts always create so many dirty dishes?

I was trying to make these spring rolls [left]. Pretty! I even splurged on some Pantone-bright veg to make it happen.

But then couldn't find any rice papers. So I purchased some nice thin pita in hopes I could make some kind of facsimile wrap-up something or other.

But then it became clear that wouldn't happen (wrap torque, tightness), and it devolved into a kind of fatoosh.

But when I look at the photo of what I was eventually able to pull together, what is really looks like is a lunch special at Bennigan's. Or one of those slaw-based rachealray recipes. In intent, I mean, not execution.

But who cares, it tasted great, even if every bowl I own is dirty somehow and I entirely failed to achieve the julienned vegetable parallelism that looked so appealing in the first photo. A good gingery marinade for the shredded chicken I added and a nice herbed mayo on top. Not spring rolls at all.

2010-05-10T12:59:00.007-05:00

Success: These blondies made with Ghirardelli bittersweet chips and pine nuts. Too much chocolate messed with the nice texture (there is a lesson there), but still. Yum! Recipes that call for melted butter ultimately more manageable for those lacking proper mixers than those needing butter ge-fluffing attention.

falcons!

2010-05-08T16:15:00.000-05:00

Thanks to my pal Dorothy (Hi Dorothy! Dorothy doesn't Computer, but regardless--thanks!) who alerted me to the peregrine falcons nesting on top of 1130 South Michigan Ave. You can watch them here on cam--I just checked it to see how they survived the little 4:00 deluge and they are doing fine.

I am really charmed by the idea of these not particularly huge birds interfering with skyscraper window-washing because of their 200 mph plunges and fierce territoriality about their wobbly little chicks, who will soon emerge. They are really beautiful birds.

poor men

2010-05-06T01:11:00.018-05:00

I'm about to sound like an earnest sex-nerd discussing life late in the student union, but whatevs: Poor men! I mean, really. Not not poor women (too), just poor men.

Awkwardboners.com is sometimes hilarious, and sometimes the boners in question are awfully awkward, but mostly the photos seem to just be evidence that men have penises (and that Jude Law doesn't always wear underwear). I don't totally see how that's cause for such twittery. Or at least this particular type of twittery.

Not only that, many of the photos show men sleeping or playing sports and they look as a result especially vulnerable. I guess any sign of vascular movement in that area is shameful? I mean...the dudes are dead to the world napping. What do you want? It's like people's squeamishness about THO, as if it's an unnatural travesty and needs to be cured, like bedwetting. I'm not sure that these are awkward boners so much as we just find boners awkward, period.

This one baffles, though! Yoiks. What the hell. Hilarious.

There's more to talk about (Frat-Bro Homoeroticism! Prurience! Beauty Ideals!), but I need to go take some Adderall and study for finals.

Very Servicable Salad

2010-05-02T00:31:00.012-05:00

- Grate a bunch of carrots
- Thinly slice a head of celery
- Cook one package Lundberg rice in chicken stock with a little salt & butter
- Toast a big handful of sunflower seeds
- Rinse & drain one can of black beans
- Drain one can of nice tuna

Make a dressing (about 1 c.) with:
- Greek yoghurt
- a lil mayonnaise
- juice of two grapefruits
- splosh cider vinegar
- salt & pepper
- pinch of smushed-up dried oregano
- big spoon of dijon mustard
- olive oil

Put 1/2 the cooked rice in a bowl to cool; after a while add about 1/2 the dressing and keep stirring. Add the tuna and stir to break up, sunflower seeds and beans, and more dressing. When it's all coolish, add the veg and the rest of the dressing, stirring to combine. Lob spoonfuls into a bowl as needed to satiate hunger & stay alive! Ages well in the fridge. And you know...has some protein in it. Looks like gruel. SERVICABLE UND SEHR YUMMY.

Thursday night Schlager!

2010-04-30T16:16:00.040-05:00

My favorite Thursday night activity: Schlagernacht! A plate of fork-tender schnitzel mit spätzle and individual pitcher of gravy at the Mirabell on Addison while listening to Pieptone!

Pieptone! ["Peep-tone"] tackles early, twisty Schlagermüsik in the form of a crisp four-person band. From their bio: "Pieptone! was conceived by former Goethe Institut students who thought a party band that sings 'auf Deutsch' might be a good way to bring language learners together . . . the Pieptone! songbook is from the pre-British Invasion 1950s and 60s, when bands and singers from Europe and the US cut the same single in two, three, or four languages." I can say that their songs definitely stick in the head as intended, especially if you spent any formative years in German class. Try listening to "Souvenirs aus Tokio"; the phrase "Vater, Mutter, Kinder und die Ooooooma" is permanently grooved in my noggin. [Full disclosure: I designed their "P" logo. Woo.]

Pieptone! plays the back room at the Mirabell restaurant every Thursday around 8:00 pm. They play Saturday, May 1, at Lizard's Liquid Lounge and next Friday, May 7, at the Flesh Hungry Dog Show at Jackhammer.

hickey science!

2010-04-27T22:00:00.010-05:00

I am going to reveal some ignorance here, but I only recently discovered that hickeys weren't just trix for kids, like the dude I remember coming to high school homeroom one day with an absolute ring of angry-looking hickeys around his neck in a badge of ownership.

So I posted a poll to see what people had to say. Out of around 105 respondents, 11 had never given or gotten a hickey, but among the rest (people could answer yes to more than one question):

7% had given one, never gotten one
11% had gotten one, never given one
23% hadn't engaged in hickeying since high school
13% still hickey and do not hide it
32% still hickey but hide it
11% really like giving hickeys
18% really like getting hickeys
3% don't like giving or getting hickeys, but do it to keep the SO happy

What about you?

They shoot TV shows, don't they? (No)

2010-04-23T17:25:00.024-05:00

I have been trying to figure out what it means about this country that we hold onto our TV shows until they are rotting and dying and have to be ripped out of our hands to be buried. Our TV shows go on forever, long long past any natural ending they have.

It's money the foments these unnaturally long life spans, so the answer to why we do this is simple in some ways. But it feels a little weirder than that.

Those last, lingering years--the gangrenous, malingering, miserable, oxygen-deprived, dead-eyed, hollow, repetitive, sucked-dry, unstable, checked-out, nonsensical, grasping, bored, sometimes frantic years--are really bad. Way worse than you would think a country obsessed with product and appearance might allow.

Shark-jumpings don't date the phenomenon that well--I think they are just the moments when you declare the time of death, long after the actual expiry. ER died in about the third or fourth season, but limped on for the next 100 years, mooching heavily around Thursdays nights, working the same schtick in increasingly cheap ways until somebody finally shot it in the head. The last few seasons of the Gilmore Girls the actors looked visibly embarrassed to be there. The last long years of Roseanne were so embarrassing I couldn't watch them. The later years of the Mary Tyler Moore Show were excruciating: that show had the terrible habit, like many, of using as its later cheap plot points tension over whether a character was going to leave (NO!), but pulling him/her back (YES!), a process that always had unintentionally grim overtones. You actors, you viewers, can check out but you can never leave. Nobody's getting out here, not until our 100 episodes, and maybe not even then.

Part of the problem is something I call sitcom entropy. The phenom has a lot of tenets, but driving it is the fact that you can't create any fictional work for six, seven, ten, twelve years in a row without the premise slipping and the actors' personalities and real lives becoming ascendant--not with a product that requires 12-hour days and years out of people's lives. Maggie O'Connell starts Northern Exposure as a plucky Yankee pilot and ends the series years later with Janine Turner's southern accent and she's, well, Janine Turner, mugging her way through belabored, stretched-out, improbable plots, wearing less and less Alaskan outerwear, using up the various possible male love interests, while we all try to pretend its not happening. TV shows become less highly directed, less managed, actors use short-hand, and the day-to-day slog emerges, one major reason that a sitcom entropy tenet is that a show will always Go to California, if only for a visit. The Hollywood Hills--metaphorically too--always start to show up in the background.

These moldering TV shows suck but somebody must be watching them. Advertisers must know this. Or are they so sure of the power of brand that they'll never not buy time for The Hills starring the people who used to be on it originally, left, and were lured back, then left again, or whatever? That's the bit I can't figure out. I'm not so sure people really like the superannuated ruins of TV shows. Do we really not want to say goodbye? What are we holding on to? Are we really that scared of our shows leaving us, or is it mostly the media-makers? It almost has a feel of death-bed ghoulishness, the way we have to know the exact moment a TV show goes away, leaves our lives. Maybe these 10th season shows are like houses (ooh, House--put that one out of its misery) we buy for celebrities so they'll have somewhere to live until they "die," i.e, emerge in their next media incarnation for us.

All I know is we love the shiny new car in this country, but Saved by the Bell: The College Years would seem to contradict this. We keep these junkers running forever.

I think the malingering is getting a little better, by the way. Our short attention spans and habit of not actually watching television on TV itself are helping, not to mention things like (somewhat) pruned HBO series that sell nicely as boxed sets and look better when they're not too big. All in all, though, it feels like another reason to like the BBC, which seems to either do shows forever (Coronation Street) or a couple punchy seasons (the classic example of Fawlty Towers) and then--boom. Out. The U.K. Office was done and finished, a rounded piece of great shape, in basically two seasons. Ours is still going, on and on and on... It can't be just money that won't let us turn out the lights.

2010-04-18T19:23:00.005-05:00

Yum. Yum yum yum yum yum. That is all.

Oh no wait! Yum yum yum yum. (There.)

paean to me kroks

2010-04-14T14:55:00.006-05:00

These shoes may:

inhibit friendship formation with people who are put off by their ugliness
combine a horrible nursey nerdness with frumpy flat-footed anti-fashion
squelch terribly when wet
occasionally let in little rocks through their holes
match the beige of my compression stockings a little closely, increasing the asexual frump
curtail how stylish the rest of me can ever look, because Crocs + anything stylish looks farcical
increase one's similarity to a duck

BUT they also:

weigh 8 oz.
cost around $33
I can hand the old ones over to the clerk for recycling when I buy new ones
AND (best of all) when traveling I can wear Crocs as slippers, walking shoes and pool shoes. Just rinse and go.

Two thumbs up!

shiny happy people

2010-04-05T20:00:00.009-05:00

I'm not sure this will hold up in court, but I really like People of Walmart--in a happy way. I don't pay much attention to the captions, which are unkind and sneering, and I guess supposed to be the POV of this project.

The photos, though, are a wonderful record. People are so hilarious, odd, weird, misguided, colorful. It's no fun to see hateful slogans on t-shirts, but other than that I never feel anything but kinda happy to see what people put on their bodies and do to their hair in this life before they go to Wal-Mart. It's sweet. Being a consumer is a freakin full-time job in America--we are seeing people in the middle of their lives.

I guess there's no way around the fact that this site is mean, and that the photos are by and large taken with a desire to laugh at people, not with them, but really: how fuckin great is this country. This is what we look like.

2010-04-03T16:43:00.002-05:00

happy birthday Doris!

2010-04-03T14:23:00.003-05:00

Twizzlers has the weird distinction of being the fartiest candy in the candy world. I feel perhaps the manufacturers should capitalize on this for marketing purposes. Or make it stop.

Are you a Wire wimp too? Click here.

2010-03-30T21:45:00.036-05:00

I'm scared of mice, heights, and movie violence. I do what I can to avoid the first two, but sometimes--often--I can't avoid that last one. And sometimes I don't want to. Then what does one do?

You can spoil the movie/TV show with spoilery spoilers, although even those don't really give you the ammunition you need to navigate a movie scene-by scene. Or you can stretch every sweater you own trying to watch the show through textiles. Or you can run out of the room, squint, la-la-la, turn on the subtitles and hold your hand up so that you just see dialogue...none of these really work. Nothing helps much. If you watch a movie, any movie, you have to submit to it. And as phobic as I am, I can't really do that knowing something violent might be coming.

I needed to see The Wire, though. It was ridiculous I wasn't able to watch it before now.

To that end, I introduce my new coping tool, the brainchild of my pal Will. He very very kindly helped me out by compiling Will's Wire Violence Guide [click to view], as we began calling it. It contains timestamps and descriptions of the worst bits (as he judged it), all with an eye toward not spoiling the plot.

I'm not sure Will gets my phobia, but the Guide works. You can see him trying to figure out how to write about different scenes (it almost reads--how apropos--like police lingo), trying to guess what would bother me. The Guide ends up being amusingly phlegmatic at times about some horrid shit as a result.

I'm sorry to say that by the end I was getting phobicked-up again, worrying about everything coming on the Guide, but the point of this story is that without it, I would have stopped watching The Wire after the first episode. Period. The guide allowed me to at least squint my way through the series when necessary and have some moments when I knew I could relax. It sucks that I can't just completely enjoy not knowing what's coming, but--there you go. Gotta do what you gotta do. You gotta be fierce, show some flex, give and take on both sides.

Thanks W!

(My favorite descriptor from the Guide: "Episode 3 - 49:45 - You see a guy getting sort of waterboarded, then at 50:15 he gets shot in the leg and has a bottle smashed over his head, then shot in the leg again at 50:30, then finally gets shot in the head at 50:55. Then at 51:10 a guy gets slapped twice.")

spring on the Ogden Slip

2010-03-29T16:00:00.007-05:00

This post is mostly an excuse to talk about ducks!

It's spring, and the relationship with sunlight is changing again. There is nothing, repeat, nothing static about buildings and living in the urban landscape. It changes constantly. Now the sun is higher in the sky, playing different games of hide and seek, finding us through the canyons and over and between buildings... It's brighter. And there's more construction noise. And the branches of trees on the river, while still bare, are taking on that knobbly look as buds begin. If you sit underneath them at some point you usually experience a shower of matter on your head as sparrows peck the buds for food.

Things with the ducks are changing. The duck couple is blowing me off a bit. I really enjoyed the winter relationship I had developed with them, as they ventured out of the water farther and more often in their search for fud. It became a really common event to see the two of them trundling slowly down the pier, or to see one flap up out of the water onto the pier and know that the other one would soon follow. I am fascinated with the physics of being a duck. Those bodies are just not made for being on land; it's as if the lord affixed some stilty legs to a sodden loaf of rye bread and told it to arise and walk, carefully transferring its balance to one pin then the other.

I'm assuming it's the same duck couple--perhaps it is actually a rotating crew of identical, monogamous Mallard couples who were harassing me for food. The birds on the Slip have raised begging to a high art form. They signal each other with noises and zoom from side to side of the river, looking for bits of flung bread (why is it always bread?). The seagulls are the loudest and most upset, but also kind of fraidy-cat. They won't get that close, but like to fly about and divebomb. The sparrows dart in and out, batting clean-up, doing surprisingly well despite their size. The pigeons hover around the edges. And the ducks work in teams. The male duck often holds the bleating seagulls at bay while the female snuffles about for food.

The other day I fed one of the ducks Skittles. He loved them. I rolled off tiiiiny little bits from an individual Skittle and tossed them at the male Mallard who was squawking beadily down his bill at me. He's since become an advocate for more HFCS labeling and won't talk to me, but--whatever. It's spring, we're all a little looser.