I saw a guy today who looked exactly, exactly like the drawing of "Prep Persona No. 4" in the Preppy Handbook, down to the hair and retroussé nose. Very odd.

The pageant hair conundrum is real and it is difficult. It creates an elusive line to toe in the lazy, girly-but-not-femmey woman's desire to work decent hair without it sliding too hard into 80s frowst (my hair's natural state) or grizzy yuck. That is...how to achieve? When to wash? With which product should I have a committed and expensive relationship? How to time the dance of washing/ignoring/fluffing/starting over?

The struggle continues. The answers elude. We soldier on.

"That is the kind of world we live in," said my cab driver about Michael Jackson. "A very short place."

ravenous piggies

I just got back from a wee vacation in Florida (note: same weather & humidity as Chicago at the moment, but more outdoor pools) and one highlight was a trip to a gastropub in Winter Park called the Ravenous Pig. Gastropubberygrubb really makes the palate happy--everything you like, only better, right? Anyhow, I had an amazing salad with delicious crisp pistachios in it and two Gruyere biscuits on the side with good salty butter (oh oh oh). The photo shows me eyeballing my grouper sandwich and frites with truffle salt. I ate the grouper (yum), then put the two halves of the brioche bun together with the lettuce and the sauce gribiche with the biggest bits of egg pushed aside and that may have been the most delicious squishy sandwich I've ever eaten. I had maybe 1/8 of the fries. For dessert some amazing sorbets, including a dark chocolate one. Other yums included nibbles of other people's handmade pretzels with a taleggio dip (YUM) and "pig tail" dessert fritters with chocolate sauce. It was wonderful and the service was great, especially as we were in a big yet separately-checked clump.

Also good in FL was a lil trip to Sonic for some tots and a burger. Sonic advertises so heavily around here, without a location for hundreds of miles--I think I would have to be some kind of inhuman advertising-impermeable monster not to want to scratch that itch at least just a little. Twas great!

One of my all-time fav photogs from the wacky old days at the Reader, Joeff Davis, was just named Photojournalist of the Year by the Press Club in Atlanta, which is where he went after Chicago. He does amazing work that's a pleasure to view, if you want to check out the winning images here or other work in general here. The dude knows how to take a photo.

There are many reasons to crank at the flow of tourismus around my River North pad, but there's no one silhouette--fashion decision--look--that makes me feel like a pissy old smokin Bette Davis (the one on Phil Donahue) faster than the sight of flip-flops. Why? Why? Why do people wear these?

I know teenage girls don't exist to make decisions with cautious care but they--the girls--look so flimsy in them. They themselves. How can you run? Protect yourself? Be ready for rain or sun? Not be vulnerable to piss and broken glass and dog poop and suddenly falling arches? Many many of the liltouristyteenagerladies in my neighborhood wear shorts, a tank top and flipflops--that's it. They look as if they couldn't (for instance) have room to carry a camera or a notepad. Walk for miles along the lake. Do anything other than look at stuff and be looked at. I know that they find ways to do things anyhow, and I don't think they have to dress to be sensible, but the general feel when you squint at all this, is that they are ever on vacation from life. They just look vulnerable. And as if they are hoping money will protect them.

Flipflops in extremis (Kate H*dson in NY recently)--also a no go, if you ask me.

My daily life is becoming (nicely) described by more rituals of tea these days: tea in the morning, tea at night, tea sometimes during the day. I had a cup of coffee yesterday, a desperate, basically pharmaceutical act to get me awake at around 3:00 p.m., and I really don't know how people can drink that stuff first thing in the morning. My stomach was somewhat empty and just one cup left me urping, bilious and jittery. I like it after a meal occasionally or maybe with a late diner breakfast, and that's about it.

Anyhow, so I'm thinking an awful lot about tea. I would never be a miffy, mostly because I never use m, but I have to say that I am willing to be quite gauche about using my tea saucer. Especially when tea mugs are getting bigger and bigger and keep the liquid hot for quite a while. It really helps regulate the temperature of the tea to pour some out in the saucer and drink--slurp genteely--as necessary. I do think about Eliza Jane Wilder in Farmer Boy every time I do it, though.

One. Thing. At. A. Time.
Just saying!

~Some seriously fleeting ephemera grabbed outta the air~

* My Sophie Tucker obsession rages unabated. Can't start my day without listening to "Fifty Million Frenchmen." The song that nukes me the most--musically, I mean--is "After You've Gone." My favorite songs are usually ones that transition well in and out of choruses/verses, and that one just...folds open like a flower. Drops achingly into the emotion of the chorus that the verse sets up even as the melody reaches higher. Creates the sound of resignation. I don't know how to describe how well I think that song's written. And I sure love her scratchy yearning version of it.

* More B&W fabulousness recently seen: the Powell/Pressburger film I Know Where I'm Going (1945), which contains a lot of slightly clichéd romantic through-lines familiar to contemporary audiences (not its fault, I think), but still...boy is it GOOD. Oh boy oh boy. And how did I not realize that I'm in love with Roger Livesey before? Colonel Blimp didn't do it for some reason. Golly. That diffident Cecil Parker-ish voice with those dashing looks and that Nose. Matinee idol dreamy...

* People are often fond of 'complaining' about their eclectic music tastes--OMG I'm so diverse!--rather as people might complain about buying bras for their big big boobs (in certain contexts, I mean; god knows that's a valid complaint)--but I have to say that that ill-thought out playlists really are kind of hard on the ears. Richard and Linda Thompson don't go well with anything other than more Richard and Linda Thompson, much less Michael Jackson. Or Pebbles. Or Journey. See? I did it too.

* Sheldon Leonard has to have the most recognizable voice in show business. Period. Full stop. TV, movies, whatever. Was there anybody else whose voice was so immediately, exactly theirs?

* I now own a ukulele. I can plink away on it not too terribly badly, as long as I don't follow a time signature, correct form, or any of the directions for chords other than C or G7. But hey. Onward and upward. Start making requests.

* I am new to the Ella Fitzgerald version of "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead" and oh! does it swing. Such a fabulous mix of stuff, her voice and that tune. It's a powerful thing.

* Just throw your hands in the air
and do the best you can, everybody

* I was lucky enough to receive a few books in the mail recently, most of which belonged my grandmother--pretty old editions of works by Louisa May Alcott. Not the rarest things in the world, as far as I know, but very valuable to me. Lovely to see my grandmother's ink signature, written in them 100 years ago on the far south side of Chicago. Thank you, Uncle K.

* I dunno about you, but my eyes are constantly rimmed with both red and then dark circles underneath these days. It is Allergy Time.

* I could drink grapefruit juice by the swiggy gatoradecommercial gallon. Just love that stuff.

* Delicious lunch at Smoque today (hi Mike!). The brizkit fell apart under my fork and with some vinegary coleslaw on a squishy bun made an unbelievable sammch.

* I have been experiencing wild, technicolor, E!-Entertainment-meets-my-life dreams these days, populated by walk-ons from all weird corners of my life. Last night's, solipsy aside, must be recorded in the sketchy ways I can still remember it at this point, because it was rather juicy. It was set in the 70s, and there were all sorts of lucite-y, Helvetica-y, NY-Art-Scene nods to 2009 technology in it: "twitter" postings projected onto the wall, "cell phone" messages on paper, "Facebook" connections. Reverse nostalgia. Rachel Ray was in the dream, and as part of a TV promotion she was helping me pick a dog to match my cats, in this case a kangaroo-like Yorkie/Rottweiler mix that had really short arms like a T-Rex and hopped around. Also for part of the dream I was in a mansion (that Rosie O'Donnell was renting for her family), which a friend realized was the Spelling mansion because of the Monet-pained lily wall murals--half lilies, half flat hotel purple/mauve--in one of the indoor bar areas. I was also running around a mall trying to get paper-wrapped canvasses to somebody or other (more 70s...I remember DVF wraparound dresses and big earrings) and the only other thing I can say here is that my brain also found a way to incorporate some of the "Jizz in My Pants" SNL video in the mix. Nuts.

I'm going to bed.

Gotcha runnin from the gun (pow)
of a brain that weighs a ton

Another entry in the category of Ongoing Gap-Filling in Film Education:

The fantastic Carrol Reed/Graham Greene film The Fallen Idol, with Ralph Richardson and Bobby Henrey (left) as the boy whose incomplete child's perspective drives the film. It's an astonishing movie, and does what I'm starting to crave most in this CGI-ed world we live in (I made it through about an hour of Night at the Museum last night before boredom with the repetitive rhythm of dead-eyed-Ben-Stiller-reaction-shot/Some-New-CGICreature-shot sent me away): tells an engaging, sometimes heartbreaking story, with human interaction at the core, as its engine. It's really really good. Cool, suspenseful, creepy, and so very specific in its time/place. It was so good I kept running out of the room.

Really enjoyed: Dawn French's Girls Who Do Comedy and Boys Who Do Comedy interview series, which you can see on YooToob (in small pieces) if you so desire. Also interesting are some of the longer interviews shown in toto, such as the one with Russell Br*nd, not a dude I find remotely interesting in the lil performance snippets I've seen, but enjoyed in his interview strangely much (part one starts here).

Waiting for me yesterday morning when I woke up: oatmeal bread, baguettes, biscuits, and a pile of chocolate oatmeal choccy-chip cookies. All handmade by arguably one of the world's greatest houseguests, to whom I say thanks, Comrade R, as you chug westward back to the PNW. Gotta love a guy who travels with his own yeast. Godspeed!

Hee hee hee!

Best $4.50 I ever spent!

How to Get from Point A to Point B During a Chicago Parade

cinderlizzy

I went to see Rossini's La Cenerentola at the movies last night--the last of the Metropolitan Opera HDTV broadcasts for this season, the encore of the May 9 performance. I was one of a small handful of people in the audience not over 65, and I can safely say that it was the only time I've seen a nun in a wimple at River East 21, but it was still quite rock and roll. The only (rokkritik) word for Rossini is propulsive.

I'm glad there was a whole seat between me and other viewers because I couldn't help bouncing around in ways you wouldn't in an opera house--tapping my toes and paddling my paws and such. I was all twitchy just waiting for it to start, eating my pretzel and ICEE (you gotta have snacks), thinking about how great (horrible) a singalong opera would be and how great opera-based Movie Quiz!-style questions would be, as fierce opera queens vied to be the first to bark the right answer.

Lawrence Brownlee sang a beautiful prince, although again, as with Florez in the other Met HDTV production I saw (Barber of Seville), he is a very technically accomplished and very short tenor without an enormous amount of acting range (he had two spressions: angry/not angry). The last scene, with the giant wedding cake, was cool but also seemed designed to try to make him really super-tall, no foolin, although he looked a little like a short candle on top.

That isn't very nice of me. Sigh. I mean--shoot. Whatever it takes, right? Can .01% of the world do what he does? But there's no way around the fact that this is a movie, not an in-person performance--if I were at the Met listening to his voice fill the hall I think I wouldn't have the same reaction that I do watching it all on a 2-D screen, whether I want to or not. Although really for me this is more about acting ability than height.

Elina Garanca, on the other hand, almost looked like a movie Cinderella who happened to be an opera star. I have never seen anybody appear to expend so little physical energy singing--not only that, singing the way you have to to hit those crazy Rossini runs and fill that house. For the first two minutes she was onscreen and off and on the rest of the opera I was sure she was lip synching. It was only towards the end and her big ballbuster finale (bootleg version here--turn it all the way the frick up) that you could even really see her intakes of breath or mouth open significantly. She must have the lungs of a thousand synchronized swimmers, not to mention unholy acoustics collapsed right there into her head--it was really kind of amazing the way her mouth distorted only as if she were talking when she sang, even during big changes in volume and speed. Combined with the fact that she has the looks and poise of an animated Disney heroine, it was pretty surreal (and brings up the inevitable specter of Cecilia Bartoli, at the other end of the mezzo twitch scale).

As I said I've only been to two of these HDTV broadcasts, but I am convinced that part of why they work is actually seeing singers expend effort--sing--perform--close-up. Blips and glitches and beads of sweat don't mar the experience, they add to it. It's like watching sports. This is what you can't see from even the closest seat, really, in person. So when somebody makes it look so effortless, as with Garanca, it's almost a little flat, especially as your mind is already casting about, processing the acoustics of a miced performance and trying to match up all the visual/audio cues. She has an astonishing voice, though, with a really interesting full lower range. Would love to hear her do other roles.

Most of the singers were really wonderful, period, especially John Relyea as Alidoro, who altogether is very hot with his slightly stephenkingsy good looks and unbelievably deep voice--I almost died listening him during the half-time show. Thomas Hampson was the MC, asking the questions, and he was dorky, I thought. He has a slightly strangulated, Wink Martindale kind of speaking voice, with a weird lateral lisp, and his interview style made me wincey.

It didn't matter though, nor the fact that the imagery on screen felt mutely-lit and dark, nor that not all the speakers were on (I think?), nor that the pantomime of the evil stepsisters was kinda tedious. The whole experience was fun. The ensemble singing was especially exhilarating, such as in "Questo è un nodo avviluppato," with all that fierce, contained power. Rossini is just cool. Watching the orchestra during the overture was an amazing experience--he really makes musicians work. I love feeling his giddy autocratic joy in the pyrotechnics and aching beauty he demands of performers, hundreds of years later.

The HVAC system in our building has been switched to a/c...it's officially spring in Chicago. Springslidingquicklyintosummer.

* In one of those odd coincidences, I turned on Alton Brown the night I made the epic mac & cheese and he was making fromage fort, which is basically what I was making, mit starch. That man really gets up my nose, between the breathless faux extemporaneous delivery and the fact that he says "timperature" instead of "temperature." Among other gripes. Anyhow. The mac & cheese is still hanging in. It can be a fun game, thinking of ways to use up what you have: making smoothies with the dregs of juice bottles and sorbet containers and seltzer, throwing things in marinades, whatever. At least, so I'm telling myself. Success last week: defrosted flank steak in a lime juice/soy marinade and served cold in a salad with more lime juice vinaigrette. Oh and with mac and cheese on the side NO WAY.

* Shopping for shoes at Zappos seems to be (unless I'm missing a workaround) an extremely gender normative experience. Some people's feet are just ping pong paddles, okay? Not male, not female.

* Hand to my heart, it appears a bagpipe player has moved into my apartment building. A bagpipe player who practices. I like saying this because it's ridiculous, but honestly I enjoy the sound. And it's better than the rumbling shudder of idling buses out on my street belching exhaust for hours and hours.

* Cat #1 fucked up Cat #2 in a knock-down ultimate cat fight challenge over the weekend. Tears were shed, yelps were yelped, Cat #1 ended up in cat jail and #2 had to be wooed out, paws bloodied and spirit cowed (and cranky, since she's a cat). All seems to be fine now, but cripes.

Unemployed Cookery

I made a successful bash at Unemployed Chili for a potluck last week (see paparazzi photo, left), a freezer/pantry-cleaning concoction of roasted chicken breast, cannellini beans, crushed tomatoes, chicken stock, garlic, fresh thyme, chili spices. Gallons and gallons of the stuff. It was good, but I've been eating it for a week straight (with Greek yoghurt and crackers), so it was time to...

...think about another thing I could cook that would involve taking a lot of things out of the freezer and turning them into a new thing I could put in the freezer.

I don't eat a lot of cheese, so when I have some that seems like it might outrun me, I throw it in the freezer. I pulled out every cheese I could find except the rind of good parmeggiano I'm saving for if I ever make minestrone or something, and created:

Macaroni and Freezer Cheez
containing therein a heartening comingling of cheeses and pastas

* Bunged in the refrigerator to thaw and get to know each other for a couple days: Huge wedge of untouched brie (yes I said brie), aged cheddar, swiss, havarti, pre-grated mild cheddar, the last of a container of soft cream cheese and some slices of American! And some grated parmeggiano/romano mix for good measure. Oh the huddled masses. Notice the impatient and un food processor-ly way in which cheese is hacked into rough chunks (above).

* Flung together: a sauce made by rendering bacon lardons, making a roux with the bacon fat (once bacon removed) and some butter, then adding mostly chicken stock and one can of condensed milk (right? evaporated? I forget). At least a quart and a half of stock, I think. For flavor, pepper, dry mustard, paprika, Worchestershire--no salt. Huge sauce. Tons of sauce. Impatience again a guiding force as I fling the cheese in without waiting for the previous handfuls to melt completely, resulting in Pockets of Swiss in final product.

* Get exhausted, let the sauce cool down. Takes about three hours, with occasional stirs of the volcanic mixture, which thickens enormously.

* Cooked: all kinds of pasta from open boxes in the cupboard. But I still should have cooked more! I boiled farfalle, elbow macaroni, baby penne, and ditalini--shakings from various boxes--and it still wasn't enough. Also, got impatient and didn't boil it long enough, but as I hate anything more cooked than al dente pasta with a passion, that's okay. I figure I'll be microwaving this stuff for weeks anyhow. Boil pasta, drain carefully, mix with the sauce. Reserve a little cooking water just in case.

* Eaten! Nice bowlful seen here, topped with a sprinkling of the bacon, which should really be turned into a crunchy bread topping, but I don't have a roaster/baking pan to bake the mac and cheese in anyhow, so the whole thing is going to be stored in the extremely thin aluminum chili pot, so thin that when I cook with it I put it on top of a Le Creuset frying pan, the heaviest thing I own.

It's good! Thrilled I put no salt in it, as you can imagine it's all pretty salty. And I like the combination of cheeses. Now I have a huge pot of mac and cheese and still a ton of cheese sauce, so it's time to buy a lot of Lactaid and broccoli. And freeze again.

Call me nutsy, but doesn't Franco Corelli's ha-ha-ha-ha-ha at the end of "Non piangere, Liu" sound like Stewie's crazy laugh? That is all.

And I remember going one night to a famous restaurant, the quiet, subtly lighted kind like the Chambord, with a man who was healthier than almost anyone I ever met, because he had just emerged from months of dreadful illness, the quiet, subtly mortal kind. He still moved cautiously and spoke in a somewhat awed voice, and with a courteous but matter-of-fact apology he ordered milk toast for himself, hinting meanwhile at untold gastronomical delights for me.

. . . Helpless, a little hysterical under our super-genteel exteriors, my friend and I waited.

"R Is for Romantic"
An Alphabet for Gourmets, M.F.K. Fisher

Sometimes you know as sure as the sun coming up that this will be a day you drag your bathrobe tie in the toilet water. Just going to happen.

Also, I think that "Lola" may be in my top five fav rock songs list. It just keeps banging around up there. Among other fabulousnesses, it resolves so well, unlike lots of other great pop songs, that descend badly from a good chorus to a bad verse or vice versa or whatever. It just swells and swells and swells.

What a horrible concept Desert Island Discs thing is in some ways. Despite all the ways we limit what we listen to, what we experience, how yucky to be stuck with one thing. Or five things. Or even just good things! Surely that's one of the perqs as a human, getting to roll around in all of it...

Scratchings from the world of mingy cultural minutiae

Getting pissed about yet another dumb generalization about Maria Callas (I'm not an avowed Callas freak but those comments still make me nuts; fat/thin/slumping/good posture/savant/hardworker/whatever) led to Playing YooToob for a while this afternoon, opera-style. Clicking and clicking and searching and comparing and listening and getting all worked up, aria after aria. Thing to thing to thing.

It's a very short hop from Callas to Tosca in general (with some serious Rossini tangents...note: I am determined to see the Met HDTV Cenerentola encore). And that landed me, as per usual, at a Te Deum fest, one of my fav things in opera, period, full-stop, since the time I was really way too young to yell "illanguidir con spasimo d'amor" along with Scarpia. I usually try the Ruggiero Raimondi, the Bryn Terfel, the Sherrill Milnes, others; today I tried a little Dmitri Hvorostovsky, whom I'd never heard sing that. Anyhow.

That's how I found a clip from Quantum of Solace that incorporates in one scene the Te Deum from a futuristic production of Tosca, actually recorded (so I read) at the Brengenz Festival in Vienna in 2007, with Sebastien Soules as Scarpia. Which is kind of cool and chic and internationale.

But in actuality...oh meh. Ehhh...meh. The music in the scene is so bad! Twerked and ProToolsed and edited or something. Lacking (very) the qualities that make that music--and that scene--so great: the strong orchestral role; the tolling rhythm; the layers of types of music; the slight but daring drone in Scarpia's part; the sheer evil! It's incredibly flattened out.

Soules himself is extremely meh, although who knows how he actually sounded before he was sound engineered. He sounds a little like a yelping tenor rather than a baritone, Scarpia being the baddest bad baritone who ever toned. Even the visuals of Soules make him look more like Cavaradossi, the beleaguered poet shirt-ed tenor, than Scarps. He looks all...anguished. Scarpia's a bad-ass. Did they think people wouldn't get that it was opera if there wasn't a tenor?

The other thing I'm noticing (which seems related in a 3T way) is that this piece of music seems to be in a fair way to be nessundormaed, if I may coin a snooty phrase; people are kind of glomming onto it the way the Turandot aria was commandeered in the 90s ("I love this song!").

Which was painful--this phenom led to a lot of really really bad recordings of that piece. And I know I'm being a crashing snob. And people have done this since the beginning of time! (Remember all the John Williams commercials for classical music turned into popular music in the 70s? "You may know Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto as 'Tonight We Love.'") But the Te Deum is so incredibly cool in situ; it's not a snippet, it's not a gobbet, it's not a commercial. It's dramatic and subversive; a guy ranting in church about disavowing god and seducing a woman! Somehow that stuff all goes away in scenes like the one in Q of S.

Which I guess it's supposed to, except that somewhere they are leveraging its oomph. Maybe that's just life. I know I am being a bit ridiculous and everything is commandeered for everything now. And look at me saying this after a bunch of YooToobing, which is totally gobbets and blips and snippets. There is just something about how modern movies borrow scenes from opera that is kinda lame, period, independent of the fact that I like opera and would rather see the opera itself than a kinda lame movie that kinda lamely uses a lame version of the music to lamely leverage the unconvincing drama of its lame plot. It's just often too referential, in a lazy ways. Too second-hand. Not sure about Cavalleria Rusticana and Godfather III, btw, since I don't want to watch Al Pacino get greased.

[Sidebar: The Quantum of Solace logo has been driving me nuts in a needly underground way, and I know why now that I've actually looked at it. Those Os...the O in "of" and "Solace" that are linked by font/placement and part of the "007" bit. NO! Oh man, no. It's bad to emphasis that O in of, first of all; you don't know where to put emphasis in your head correctly as a result, having it dumped on the preposition there. Plus they are Os, not 0s, which also clanks when you link it up with the seven (and the gun). It's not horrible, it just...does not please.]

And with this, I think I've used up my cranky gouty old bachelor lawyer gripes about cultural matters for a couple weeks. But there you go. The other possible name for this blog at one point was Cahiers du Whatever I Think, so...yeah, fuck it. There you go.

Nel tuo cuor s'annida Scarpia!

1. I have indulged in a truly juvenile, puerile, embarrassing, ridiculous, idiotic, high school screen saver! Fun. Every once in a while there are advantages to not having a job.

2. Funniest word I heard from a Frenchman recently: whooped, in this case as in whooped cream. Also: attentionnate. Cool new adjective, that.

3. I just have to say it, because it's been coming up a lot recently. I DON'T BELIEVE IN THE OXFORD COMMA (most of the time). I don't like it. If you feel like you can't be friends with me anymore, I understand. But I just can't do it.

4. The whole snooty smug billmaher/sethmacfarlane/atheistic axis, if I may lick my finger and put it in the air to take a half-assed reading of the zeitgeist for a moment, is starting to irk me. It's limited. In all the ways that it justly charges fire-breathing religion to be.

5. The proper way to respond to difficult kenkens: fling your pencil across the room. Cripes!