subconscious is a cultural magpie

Yesterday: Brief glimpse of segment on "Unwrapped" on the origin of the Bloody Mary with images of the murals at the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis in the background + clicking on the Lyric Opera's website about the current production of Faust and its cast, including Rene Pape = dream last night about Maxfield Parrish's work, only his name was "Rene Livingston."

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Rok Bannnd

I have now played Rock Band. OH MAN. That shit is fucked up.

and...an amateur mistake

I know better, but I did it anyhow: I thought it would be nice to use up a bit of rice milk and cream cheese by making some frosting, but I committed the cardinal sin of starting with the liquids. It really didn't look like a lot and I thought I would probably use only a couple cups of confectioner's sugar. One whole bag later, I had a big soup of not particular distinguished frosting that now sits in the freezer for the day when I have to frost a dozen sheet cakes. Oy.

more culinary news from the unemployed

Well..."news."

* Achieved: really good meatloaf made with ground beef, cooked brown basmati rice, eggs, ketchup, dijon, spices, a little crumbled bacon and (from the Necessity Is the Mother of I. files) a panade made with panko and rice milk! It really worked. I have a history of making horribly dense, unhappy meatloaf that makes you wonder why you ruined perfectly good ground meat and turned it--"stretched it"--into something that takes longer to eat up than just plain horrible overcooked meat. This meatloaf was tender and delicious and I am totally into the leftovers, a very good sign.

* Thanks to a friend and former co-worker, Vera Videnovich, who runs a CSA and a farm in MI (you can see a recent tour of it here), I got a beautiful free bag of Concord grapes at Veggie Bingo on Wednesday. I had an ambitious idea of making jam with them, but instead I whirred up the grapes--pips, skins and all--with some water and a tablespoon or so of vanilla sugar in the blender. Whirred and whirred, and then sieved through a very fine sieve, to arrive at this really delicious juice (left). It could have been thinned even further. The whole experience was quite purple. Delicious.

* Worth every penny (when it's on sale): Miller's Amish Country Poultry, produced in Orland, Indiana. It's exponentially better than any other chicken I ever buy and from a money-saving standpoint there is much less waste/trimming necessary. A great thing to stock up on for the freezer when it's on sale.

* Fabulous version #295387 of my favorite salad: four grated carrots, one cubed cuke, one 6-oz can of Natural Sea tuna, salted sunflower seeds, and a dressing made with fresh lime juice, honey mustard, miso, rice & cider vinegars and olive oil. Love that stuff.

* I am becoming a fan of cooking bacon in the oven these days. So much easier than dealing with one curling-up strip at a time. Just throw it in the oven in a foil-lined pan at about 375 for 1/2 hour. Done and done, and the fat is easy to drain this way too. Another thing really worth buying on sale. You can freeze the cooked bacon too, and pull a strip or two out for flavoring purposes as needed.

* Hints from Heloise tip for your cat: best cat toy chez Cahiers at the mo is an empty and de-labeled prescription bottle, filled with a few matchsticks or sea shells. It makes a satisfying rattly sound and if it's small enough can be carried around in their mouth.

fast food lunch

It is the kind of McDonald's, in its proximity to a hospital, with customers who comprise mostly: loud medical salespeople with rolling sample bags; incredibly busy healthcare workers for whom lunch is just a change in activity, not a break; and careful, calm, scared patients, usually in the company of a loved one. Maybe the occasional tourist. The place has been recently rehabbed, which means, in addition to a dark, boutique hotel color palette in the dining areas, walls full of strangely sad oversized black and white photos which are supposed to look classy. Lonely people on snowy roads, empty parks, ominous clouds rolling over stormy prairies. Like every McDonald's I ever go to in this part of downtown, the staff are almost exclusively recent Latino immigrants, sometimes with a coworker operating as a translator for front staff as they train.

I was there after the lunch rush, standing with others in a polite but vulturous circle around the counter waiting for our orders. The McDonald's employee was waving a small bag at us, saying "cheeseboirger," more and more loudly as no one stepped forward to claim it. She spied an older white man in our group and said, "You--it's yours. Cheeseboirger." "No," he said, "it's not mine." "Yes, yes, cheeseboirger," continues the salesclerk, waving the bag at him more emphatically. I see another older man toward the back of the group, same height and hair but a different colored jacket, guess where this is going and start to unfocus my eyes.

The stand-off continues, the collective impatience for our food raising the heat on the scenario a bit, until suddenly the second man stumbles forward and claims his burger and we all smile along with the laughing, embarrassed clerk who says, "Oh! Oh! I'm sorry, okay." One of the salespeople types barks with recognition at the problem, trying to catch my gaze, and makes a joke along the lines of something like "Hah! They can't tell us apart!" Only I don't really know what he's said, because I'm trying not to hear as my eyes completely unfocus in the direction of a spot about a foot above his head and smile in a completely meaningless way and at no one in particular.

2 follow-ups, 2 thoughts

- Hair (following up on post below) is did. I even got a weave as part of the Federal Extension Benefits program. HAHAHAHA. *hic* Okay, I didn't. But it's cut. Thank god.

- The night after I posted this entry about crepes dentelles they made an appearance in (yet another wild) dream. In my dream, though, I "figured out" that they were called "Milk of Pasta" in another language--French or Italian, I forget which. As in flakes of dried milk of pasta. Wild.

- I had a lot of thoughts about the Letterman situation, many of which don't have much urgency now that I'm less shocked, but one that lingers about his "bunker" is how much it reminds me of the trysting room Samuel Insull apparently had built into the proscenium arch of the Civic Opera House (to which he'd drag chorines and such). There are all sorts of issues of practicality attached to such a space, but it is interesting, however you look at it.

- Have you ever been to a post office that wasn't crowded? I haven't, and I mean in any neighborhood in Chicago. Never been to one that didn't have one employee waiting on one impossibly long line. Do not understand why service is being cut.

need my crop dusted. my do did. my flip whipped.

From the It's My Blog files: I haven't had a haircut since June and I am not sure I am going to make it til Wednesday, which is when I have a hair appointment. Gott sei dank. I hope I can hang on until then without taking scissors to it myself (not joking), because this stuff is DIRE. COMPROMISED. My hair looks like people's fake bad hair in commercials for hair straighteners, only it's real. A nowhere-pointing pile of hay with scratchy ends that nothing changes. I really think Congress ought to consider an Emergency Hair Management Program. Duh.

Some interesting and excessive air-brushing sighted recently: Courtney Cox in the billboard ads for Cougar Town (query: so wrinkles there aren't okay either? Aren't they kinda the point?) and Ricky Gervais in ads for The Invention of Lying. Cor!

Earworm of the month: "Blame It on Me" by Chrisette Michele, a kinda corny, balls-out, R&B mopping-up/breakup song with the coolest key changes I've heard in a long time. Really hard to shake.

crispy ephemeral joy

I love a lot of cookies, including big dire American cakey chocolate creations, but the cookies that I love the most are those on the superficially more boring end of the spectrum. Thin crisp buttery cookies, various shades of blond and tan. Oblaten, cialde, gaufrette, pizzelle, langues de chat, tuile, fortune cookies, plain stroopwaffles, Pepperidge Farm Chessmen. I buy and eat empty ice cream cones. I love the cookie sticking up out of a sundae more than the sundae. If there are lightly browned edges, I like it.

My current crisp buttery cookie obsession are crepes dentelles from Brittany. The ones most commonly sold in the US seem to be Gavottes, which in their (dark- or milk-) chocolate-covered state are the most insanely delicious cookies I know and almost impossible to stop eating.

Even happier, when you crush up crepes dentelles they become feuilletine, crisp flakes used to make other pastries and desserts, or sometimes into a thin bark when coated in chocolate and then broken up. Leonidas makes a feuilletine chocolate bar I am dying to try.

This photo shows a man in Brittany making crepes dentelles (makes it clearer how they're shaped) and this video shows chefs making them in a slightly different shape for a napoleon.

My favorite cookbook, The French Cookie Book, seems to have no recipes for these particular cookies. I don't know know why; perhaps because they've been produced industrially more than in patisseries. The book is great, though. It's very different from many contemporary pastry recipes/books. This book covers over 500 pages of recipes that differ primarily in technique and tradition, not ingredients. Which is to say, every possible kind of crisp buttery cookie. It's an amazing reference.

things I know at age 43

* Ducks' motors are their feet. Their webbed feet. I am fairly sure I thought that there was some additional method of locomotion involved (where or what, I don't know), but a good six months of duck-watching has driven this fact home: it's the feet that move them in the water. Why did I think they had something else down there? Or nothing? I think it's because ducks are so top-heavy, so extremely over-balanced, like a huge mound of whipped cream on these little stilty bits. Didn't really seem possible that just feet were taking care of this, when it takes pretty big wings to make them fly. These funny-looking things dangling below the main duck fuselage. Feet. Birds swim with their feet.

* Arkansas is never where I feel it should be on the US map. Same with Wyoming (sometimes). And that whole east coast circle, where states are gathered into a tight knot on the coast (NJNYPAMDRI, etc.) is still very confusing to me and often seems wrong. There are magic places where I feel some states should be, which usually has to do with ranking them with other states, but that place never really exists. Geography is getting both more liquid and more firm as I age.

* The entire 1992 SWV album It's About Time (minus slow jams) is good, and not only that (who knew) actually had Pharrell and the Neptunes involved in production, which means they must have been in middle school at the time or something.

* Produce perfectionism serves no one, gets you nowhere. Let it go. As a lifelong quirky vegetable appreciator (picky eater...weirdo...whatever) I have traditionally been loathe, still--STILL--LOATHE--to go after fruits and veg the way I really want to. It's ridiculous. I would buy a pint of strawberries and the need to hull them perfectly, and in perfect time, meant that in the end I'd just pitch them cause I couldn't get it done. Forget produce perfectionism. If you don't save all your onion skins for stock--it's okay. If you can't compost (yet), because you live in a big urban box--it's okay. If you only like the tender inside stalks of celery--pitch the rest. It's fine. If you don't save your fennel fronds to chop as garni--it's okay. I am not sure where the foodie perfectionistic fervor with which I approached fruit and veg came from, but somewhere in the last year or so I realized it was nothing but trouble. Someday I will buy a rabbit and he can eat all my mistakes and wastefulness.

de la Liz

I listened to 3 Feet High and Rising and De La Soul Is Dead so much I think they wore grooves in my cerebellum, but somehow I never did the same with Buhloone Mindstate. These days, though--and somewhat predictably, à la older/wiser--I am really enjoying getting to know this album. It is dense, thick with rewards when you spend time with it. A beautiful thing.

things have cycles

I'm trying to remember when I first became obsessed with Brahms' German Requiem. I think it was not long after college, by which time I had pretty much worn out my requiem reserves on Mozart; I would wander around Chicago playing the Von Karajan recording of the (Brahms) Requiem with Gundula Janowitz on me cassette Walkman (the nerdy lugubrious side of my personality will always out.) I went to the CSO specifically to hear it sometime in the mid-90s, only I can't remember now if it was Solti or Barenboim conducting (I think it was Barenboim, and he took it really slow. Too slow.) I will always remember watching the opening New York Philharmonic gala on PBS just after 9/11--when they substituted the Requiem at the last minute and nobody clapped afterward--which is still one of the odder and more intense musical experiences of my life. I felt like I had dreamt it. I've heard it on planes, in cabs...

Music has cycles, comes up in waves. And I am definitely back in a Deutsches Requiem cycle now, especially with the "Wie lieblich sind diene Wohnungen" movement. It started when someone I know (not well, but well enough to be all excited for them) in the Tanglewood Chorus was preparing to sing it at Kennedy's funeral. Then I heard it in church last week. Then I heard it in some kind of movie preview or something. Then today there was a loud truck horn outside (not at all an unusual occurrence) but what made me perk up was that it was a strong A♭, the first note (I think--I mean, I know it's the note, just not entirely sure it's A♭--I had to noodle around on GarageBand to find it) of the organ beginning in the "Wie Lieblich" segment. I could just hear it in my head.

The Requiem is an intense piece of music to be involved with. I think you have to kind of be careful. It's not just that it's sad, because it is triumphant also, but it is so intensely emotional that one can be not sure what to do next. Perfect and beautiful, too. Art hurts!

Julie & Julia

Qualifiers render criticism boring, if not meaningless, but I am wondering, having seen Julie & Julia, if I might not some day suddenly really like this film. Or something. Because my reaction to it was so thoroughly Eh (on the calibrated Ew/Meh/Eh/Yeah/Ooo! movie scale) that I was a little thrown and still don't really know if I can trust it. It's not due to a lack of interest in the subject matter--rather the opposite--which is why I expected to have a stronger reaction, of any kind, but the movie felt rather like the proverbial pablum of reviews. The things I didn't like about it were offset by its competency, but the overall effect was still eh. Not awful, just...eh.

To wit: The day I went to see this I was in the mood to cry at a movie. It takes very little for me to do so--I can cry during previews. It wasn't that I was particularly sad or upset; sometimes you just rely on a movie to act as a drawing agent or poultice and release whatever feelings are bouncing against the surface. It feels good. However, nothing in this movie made me want to cry or even well up with tears against my will, which seems significant.

Some thoughts:

* Stated, Not Shown is bad, but Stated and Shown = worse. The movie felt like sort of a Julia Child primer, which is fine, but many themes felt overemphasized, then shown, then described and commented on again (usually by Julie P). The easiest and worst example would probably be the last line--"I love you, Julia"--uttered by Julie at Julia's kitchen in the Smithsonian. (Really? She loves her? No way, never woulda guessed that from the title.) Or Child's height: this was an extremely significant thing to know about her, but it's approached from what feels like an outsider point of view (for instance, the way her sister talks about it) and pushed over and over. Or the dinner party where the Childs talk about meeting in Ceylon...it was rather like a narrative piece of fiction at times, rather than first-person talk. I don't know, maybe being familiar with the basic facts of Child's life didn't make me a target for this film (i.e., I'm being a snob), but surely that shouldn't have made it as uninteresting as it felt?

* Nora Ephron has a lot of food knowledge, but I felt like she pushed it aside for this film, as she did Child's and Powell's. There is a lot of food appreciation, but the food interaction was kind of sketchy, despite the beautiful visuals. If the power in Powell's story lies in the real cooking journey she was on, then I wanted to see it: how did she really bone the duck (not make just the first cut); what was it really like to have to shop/cook so many dishes; what did she have to make over and over. What the movie shows you are a lot of little ends of food arcs: she (or Child) has just finished making this something or other, and here's what happens. There is a sort of bland sitcom feel to the structure. No tooth to it. I think that might have something to do with how much the film was trying to cover, but it's also a decision about how Ephron is choosing to interact with her audience.

* This movie polished up to a fine point the problem with a lot of drama these days, which is that the tools of visual storytelling have mostly to do with computers. Somebody types something...looks quizzical...looks hesitant...looks resolved...hits enter...yes! Something's happened! Only it hasn't, really. There is a lot of "She hits ENTER" stage direction in this film. It's boring. There is sooo much footage shot from computer POV of Powell (Amy Adams). Why that was chosen over cooking imagery I don't know except for the fact that I think this film is really about publishing. Not food, not writing: publishing. The strongest points and biggest stories in both Js' lives in this film were about 1) blogging, and 2) Child's eventual publishing of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (last shot of the movie, I think). The blogging part of the story, especially, was spelled out in incredibly unnecessary detail, a conceit that had no real momentum past the two-hour running time.

* I am such an old queen: fairly sure that I clapped my hand to my chest and said "Oooo girl" with a little hiss when I saw Amanda Hesser playing Amanda Hesser in the Amanda Hesser scene. And I was guessing (incorrectly) Frances Sternhagen would play an older Judith Jones, despite having the wrong nose; she has the right WASPy pedigree.

* I could be reading this wrong, but is there not a great deal of Noel Riley Fitch's biography of Child in this movie? Didn't see it credited. Child was the publickest public figure ever, so perhaps it's not the point, but a few times I felt that some of what was being described onscreen had to do with ideas from that book.

* The art direction is pretty great in this film. They obviously got a lot of the details right, and it was weird to see (have to use this word here) iconic Child moments--like their nude bathtub postcard--being recreated real-time. Stanley Tucci is good. His and Streep's scenes feel like they have real traction. I am glad that they didn't make him mousy-bald-short, since Paul Child had a kind of macho feel to his looks. And I'm happy to say that Ephron's over-use of American Songbook standards is easing up. But still. I dunno.

I have a simple test for whether or not I liked a film: does it wax or wane? After, I mean. Am I thinking about it still, or forgetting it. Are some of the seeds it planted sprouting, or is the ground fallow. This one...a waner. So far.

Best euphemism for We're Always Snooping Into Your Internet Usage: Amazon's product suggestions labeled "Inspired by Your Browsing History." Yick.

Earl!

I am in dire need of some decent reading copies of my favorite books. The paperback copies of some of my favorites are ridiculous: falling apart, in limp brownish pieces, fluttering out of my bookcase when I go hunting. I wanted to reread Busman's Honeymoon the other day and was forced to do sneaky Look Inside! things on Amazon to print out the missing first 12 pages (I took screen grabs--you can't print them out directly--and cropped them). I have filled in the reading copy gap for some writers with good contemporary softbound editions (like the Moyer Bell versions of Mapp & Lucia) or not-too-valuable/expensive hardbound, but some contemporary editions are kind of off-putting aesthetically, plus the older editions can be better.

Raymond Chandler has been a particularly difficult writer to find good used/old copies, in my experience. Too popular. And too valuable when they are old--contributes to the expensive old edition/cheap reprint phenom. Some of the old/reprinted versions are awful aesthetically too, though--more than that. The absolute worst cover I have for any book, period (other than the tampon-commercial covers for some Anthony Powells and the dustjacket for the 70s reissue of Mapp & Lucia) is this cover of The Long Goodbye. Too hilarious. I think this is supposed to be Earl, the crazy kinky cowboy, but why there's huge cobra there or whatever, I don't know. (Is there a snake in the book? Is this just supposed to be all Evil n shit?) And if that building is supposed to be Dr. Verrenger's then it looks a little more like the Golden Door. Plus--Earl! Heh! Why Earl? The whole effect is very Hunter S. Thompson + Tom of Finland + Rockford Files, not to mention misses entirely what the book is about, with all its intense elegiac mood. You can almost see some freelance illustrator being given a list of stuff, picking "cowboy," then spending days coming up with something that's just kinda wrong.

I actually quite enjoy awful book covers on some level, the way I enjoy awful blurbs that make it clear nobody read past the first chapter. They're kind of fun. Bad book design is pretty much just as fascinating as good. But oh I need a better copy of this book.

Pipe down kid, the old man's hung*

Pausing a moment to cluck appreciatively over my new salt cellar, which is really a sugar bowl from the old *Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago. It's part of a sugar bowl/creamer set made from classic battered hotel silver, very heavy in the hand. Too fabulous.

Hah! Fucking love this (from the Onion; click on last sentence for article):

Next Tarantino Movie An Homage To Beloved Tarantino Movies Of Director's Youth

MADRID—While attending a European press junket Monday for his film Inglourious Basterds, director Quentin Tarantino announced that his next project, Jack Rabbit Slim, will go into production this fall, and will be an homage to his favorite director and screenwriter of all time: Quentin Tarantino.

"I've been a Tarantino fan for as long as I can remember," said Tarantino, who repeatedly referred to his hero as "The Master"...

"I didn't recognize it without the cheese," said my waiter.

I am going to try to use a blog post not using the word I. Nope, can't do it.

cinematic education, part whatever

Everyone has gaps in their movie-watching. My gaps are particularly embarrassing at times, due to a complete aversion to scariness, violence or gore, and a disinterest in anything computer-generated, sci-fi, or based in alternate reality or on comic books, which covers about 85% of most films made these days. And I'm picky. And I re-watch films. And (not cool to admit) my tolerance for aggressively unhappy cramped films is pretty low these days. And my ass doesn't fit in the Siskel Center's seats. I have a decent film education, including parents with much better and wide-ranging taste than mine, but oh the gaps.

Try having a conversation in 2009 if you've never seen The Matrix (for instance). Or have seen Star Wars only twice in your life, including once when it first came out and you were eleven. Or never saw the Lord of the Rings trilogy; or rather, saw only the second one at the old Village Theater on Sheridan Road, alternately bored and scared by the mice scuttling around near the screen. Or can't really watch Tarantino films, but don't really want to, either. This is a very tip-of-iceberg thing to put out there (there are other reasons for my gaps), but whatever. They're there.

I am pretty good at covering the gaps, and not just out of a desire to hide my ignorance, when I care to do so. Not having read a book or seen a movie has never stopped me from talking about it--writing a paper about it--giving it thumbs up/down--referencing it. I'm inclined that way, although I think we are all professional cultural magpies these days anyhow. We are all lists of favorites, conglomerations of cultural signifiers...it is easy to pretend you know about something, because basically you do. Even if you don't.

However, I also like embracing my ignorance. I enjoy the power in "I don't know," "I've never seen that," or "What's The Godfather about again?" I especially can enjoy being honest about those films that you feel like you've seen and may have seen bits and pieces of a million times but haven't really seen.

In that spirit, I have a friend whose biggest gaps tend to be the opposite of mine (basically he doesn't do pre-1968), so we are trading lists of Must-Sees. He has to watch these ten films:
All About Eve (1950)
The Apartment (1960)
Brief Encounter (1946)
The Crowd (1928)
A Face in the Crowd (1957)
The Fallen Idol (1948)
House of Games (1987)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
The Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

And I have to see these:
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Bottle Rocket (1996)
The Insider (1999)
Gattaca (1997)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
RKO 281 (1999)
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Se7en (1995)
Unbreakable (2000)
Zero Effect (1998)

Note: I know these lists are somewhat unbalanced. But the point is I haven't seen the ten films on my friend's list. I want to push myself out of my comfort zone. So I'm just going to watch them. No long justifications for our choices using the word "seminal" or "important"; just watch them. The fact that my remote doesn't work helps, because all I can do is put a DVD in and hit Play, then go sit down and watch it. There's no pause, no subtitles, no slowing down or speeding up.

Will report more as I'm further in my 10!

3-1/2 years of the Cahiers

It's our 3.5 year birthday here:
1,225 days of blogging,
averaging one post every 2/3 days. Not too bad. Long may scribblings thrive! In aeternum floreant!

(From an old Doonesbury cartoon touting
Nerd-Care™ skin lotion: "Now available in pale,
whiter shade of pale, and new minty green")

How is it that the word vagina became ascendant? Versus vulva, I mean? Is it like a Betamax/VCR thing? So often when people say 'vagina' they really mean 'vulva.' I am curious how 'vagina' won out (have some theories). Perhaps some lobbyist money changed hands somewhere along the way.