In the middle of interrupting someone (and not for the first time) this weekend, I interrupted myself to note that I should go to Interrupters Anonymous. Which would be a great Boscht Belt routine, yes?

"My name is Liz and I'm--"
"HIIII LIIIIII--"
(etc.)

I really must stop doing this, although I am sure that only Dr. Marvin Monroe-style treatment would cure me, and maybe not even then. I do apologize.

car washes are scary. no, wait--funny.

Favorite, awfullest movie drunk scene...so brill

Today's best--and incomplete--dumb-ass Yahoo headline: "The Appendix: Useful and in Fact Promising." ERRRRR.....errrr? Promising...promisingly appendixxy? Wot? I also really want to push a comma in there somewhere. The actual thrust of the article is pretty interesting, although the best part would be the sidebar: "Top 10 Vestigial Organs." Now that is good journalizm.

Scrabble terms, or if they're not they should be

vowelrrhea - way too many vowels among your tiles; a rack like AOIAAU or IIEOEEA

consonated - way too many consonants among your tiles; helpful collections such as NZNLDFB or CLRDGGP

cockblocking - when your opponent uses a spot you had your eye on, especially when they utilize a 3W or put down something eh when you had a bingo or high-scoring play

a groundhogday - getting the same tiles over and over, making it seem like the universe is trying to point out an amazing move you're just not seeing

bingophasia - missing a bingo that's right in front of you

bingogimme - all seven tiles arriving perfectly arranged in word form

anorbingosmia - having a bingo and nowhere to play it; also, not being willing to give up on it (stage one of Kübler-Ross model)

bonanza - another word for bingo

hollow bunny - long elegant words with no point value

depth charge - tiny words of great point value (XI, AX, ZA)

tile blindness - stubbornly, exhaustedly trying to make words like ELORGIN or XANARU work

(click image below)

unbelievable

Among the possible calm, reasoned responses to PETA's idiotic new billboard (what the fuck is your problem / are you really that fucking stupid / etc.) the one thing I keep coming back to is: do they really think there are no fat vegetarians? Do they really think this? Do they really think their support base is just thin people? And if so...why exactly do they think this?

Why do you think this, PETA? Are you (lazily) linking a moral imperative with body size? Judging by all their previous campaigns + this one the answer is obviously yes, but I wonder if anybody there (or people like Anthony Bourdain, who hates PETA but sounds surprisingly similar to them at times) thinks about what that means, at base. Not just in its fundamentally fascist implications, but for marketing and organizational functionality in general. Does this mean they miss chances to gather support from fat people in various ways? And if they just don't want fat supporters: are they happy to take fat people's money? Really?

It's the stupidity and narrowness of the assumption veg = thin that really amazes me. And the at-all-costs imperative of their sloganeering and its breathtaking implications that piss me off and scare me, frankly.

Bottom line: it's only people's dislike of their own bodies, of themselves, that allows campaigns like this to get to the point where somebody is handing somebody money for a billboard, much less get out of some pissy crack-fueled brainstorming session or however PETA came up with it. If they really know and/or don't care that a decent percentage of their supporters are fat, then this billboard is among all its other problems a tacit admission that they approve of the body hatred. And are happy to profit from it.

There are a lot of fat vegetarians. Just noting. Not I, but if I were one, I'm fairly sure this billboard would make me go eat a steak.

p.s. Billboard girl has a really cute suit!

Mangosteen juice: is it supposed to taste like suntan lotion?

Things I Don't Know How to Do
Vol. XXXIX
On the perils of songwriting

Sometimes the process of refining a tune in your head is indistinguishable from taking a melody that comes to you and gradually turning it from one you created into one that already exists. Which is kind of depressing. Tweaking and repeating a tune until it becomes "Bringing in the Sheaves" or "Lola." Or whatever. The process is also complicated by the fact that a good song often sounds like you might have heard it before just because it's good; also, most every song has actually been written already; also, there's nothing new under the sun; also, the human brain is thirsty and traitorous and brings up things from the back that seem new but are just in dusty storage. It's still fun, though: songwriting.

See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise,
Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.

(Ephesians 5:15, KJV)

What an unwieldy bit of thought that is! Most interesting.

I am just going to say it: whoever was spinning records at the McDonald's on Wabash in the Loop today was doing a great job. Dang.

Friday Rattle Bag

• My taste in sushi is childlike, so bear with me, but: excitement! My local Japanese "fusion" joint (sort of pan-Asian, with a big dose of Cocktailian and thumping techno) makes my favorite sushi, kappa maki, in a way that turns out to improve on it tremendously. Which makes sense, as it is very simple, so differences loom large. I love plain cucumber maki, but have always found it a little unwieldy, with the nori/wrapping tension on the outside helping the insides to shift precipitously and hurry the eating--not experience the cucumber--the way I want to. This place makes kappa maki with the rice on the outside--sort of like this photo. I don't know if it's kosher or not (uramaki [?] style I mean, for just cucumber), but I've never seen vegetable maki made like this. The cucumber is cut very small, and the sushi pieces themselves are not too thick, so the whole thing has better physics: it falls apart more sensibly in your mouth, and the sesame seeds on the outside are the perfect touch. And the cucumber/rice ratio is better this way too. A small thing, but delicious. I had two orders of it with some chicken gyoza yesterday for lunch, and it made me hum.

• Air & Water Show is on this weekend. How weird (as ever) to live with the sound of jets and booming technology overhead and be so blase.

• I'm sure it's been remarked upon before, but it's interesting to watch Doris Day's first film and the snappy, Ginger Rogers-y character she plays--so different from all the various later Doris incarnations--especially as she sings "Put Em in a Box," which I think she debuted in this film, and directly references a song that would be the title of a later film of hers. It has a funny feel, to almost see her commenting on future Doris:

You know what to do
With good old "Tea for Two"
And the girl for you, the boy for me
Put 'em in a box
Tie it with a ribbon
Throw 'em in the deep blue sea
'Cause love and I we don't agree

• Martha Stewart Living seems to have discovered the Midwest (from a design POV). Tis interesting to watch.

• Success: Makeshift pasta sauce using a knob (MFK) of Irish butter, a small amount of white cheddar, pepper, and a decent spoonful of Dijon mustard to help the non-emulsifying dairy emulsify. I heated the mixture in the bowl (mostly over the boiling pasta water itself), stirring often, then added a fair amount of whole wheat spaghetti. YUM. It had a sort of carbonara-like feel. I really like pasta dishes that aren't heavily sauced and let you taste the pasta--this was about the perfect ratio and a good match for the whole grain.

• Fav King of the Hill character these days: Ted Wasonasong. He makes me so happy.

• The word "literally" is being misused to the point of no recognition (exaggeration inflation management!), but abused in an even worse way is "iconic." OH MY GOD! It's used constantly, in every possible medium, relevant or not. ICONIC ICONIC ICONIC. This has a wild effect on the word itself, as it seems to be employed to mean "important"/"pay attention to this"/"whitecaps in a media tsunami"/whatever, and any literal (hah) or relational meaning it might have is diffused. It's just...feeb. All this over-codifying. I can't explain this right, but oooongh! (is the point)

• I am more or less a whole-hearted believer in integrative medicine, but some part of me can't help noting that the main functional difference between it and conventional medicine might just be lighting. Either the absence of serious flourescent lighting or a delay until it appears in the examination process.

• Unbelievably delicious: Stephanie Blythe's version of the cards scene from Carmen. My current goofy high-repetition yootoob opera-snippet. Her control and smoothness in the "en vain pour eviter les reponses ameres"...cor! Heartbreaking.

I love this song. And am endlessly tweaked by the daring, bizarre meter in tee-vee-AN-tenna-IN-the-back.

Ativan-dialing: dumber and slower than drunk-dialing.

We at the Cahiers pride on ourselves on cutting-edge criticism, so you know--hang tight.

The other night I engaged in the cinematic equivalent of cutting and watched Flashdance. Beginning to end, commercials and TV edits. I do stuff like that sometimes. I like to experience the bad. Get on in it.

There is special oomph in the bad film that has too much self-importance to be quite camp, even more oomph if it's a film that was crucial in one's own [artistic, sartorial, cinematic, consumerist] development. I can remember, even now, how it felt to see that film for the first time. Oh, the clothes.

Flashdance is horrid. It seems only more horrid now, but not delicious horrid. There's no real bemused affection to be had for it, or even for the people suffering through being in it. Well, okay, a little, but still--it's so aggressively bad. And superficial/visual. Almost venal. It's like a clinic in the Male Gaze. Plus the story has the bizarro Esterhaagendazs feel in which a woman thrashes pointlessly around a motiveless plot (not unlike Elizabeth Berkley in her shark week showgirls sex scene) seemingly for the purpose of boobs bouncing and hair flouncing and...what is this shit about again.

It's not just the director's fault: Jennifer Beals is completely awful. Her performance doesn't have enough collective juice to fuel a 30-second hypercut commercial montage, except that's really what it seems like she's shooting for (which would also be the director). It is just downright hard to watch. And it makes the scenes that aren't really her (body doubles, female and male) look even more stupid. WIGS MAKE EVERYTHING REAL.

Julia Phillips wrote about this movie that "here [the filmmakers] were, starting the decade by tripping over their shoelaces and each other for credit on something from which she might have considered having her name removed." Which brings up a crucial point: this movie is so 80s. A comment that an editor would not (should not) let me get away with, but really. It's SO 80s, in the sense that it seems to figure that with enough grey-sky cinematography and soundtrack it was all so deep we'd feel it forever.

quarante-trois

Randomly:

1. Keeping me up last night in the middle of major Restless Liz Syndrome (terrible insomnia this week): the origin of the quote, "The world is made for people who aren't cursed with self-awareness." (Bull Durham--duh.)

2. More wisdom from French-speaking people: "There are some aspects of our lives that we should just live it up to the universe."

3. I need to get Dita von Teese alone in a women's bathroom for five minutes and find out what she does to make her lipstick so perfect/long-lasting.

4. Onward and upward.

Eyelashes! Have you noticed how very much the beauty ideal for lashes is expanding? Teeth are getting bigger too, but eyelashes...! Cripes. Inflation run amok. The eyelashes shown in most current ads/commercials (these are from L'Oreal) are downright furry. Furry, and impossible without at least some partials, hello. The language used to sell them is very fierce and rather like the English used for packaging Japanese candies or on a fat girl porn site. LashBlast! Lash Injection! Major Lash! Big Fatty! Extra Super Lash! 2000 Calorie! Voluminous! Full 'N Soft! Volum' Express Turbo Boost! Pubic hair disappearing from the American female but our eyelashes grow ever bigger.

Whet Moser at the Reader wrote a really great look at the way the Benjamin story has been reported, at the sloppy language and assumptions that link the media attention together. I think I might appreciate his take on this most of all, because the way the story has been written about--the way these stories are written about in general--is the hardest aspect to parse out.

On my own list of songs that Never Did Anything For Me (ones that other people love, I mean, such as "Celebrate" and "Hot Hot Hot" ungh) is "I Will Survive," one I kind of wish I liked but forever makes me cringe when somebody puts it on at a party and I'm supposed to be all excited to dance to it. I just don't respond to it. Never did. It doesn't tug me in any direction, boogie-ily, musically, IndominableSpirit-ily, melodically, whatever. Meh.

If you are looking for a good i-will-survive song, though, I would recommend Patti LaBelle's radio hit, "All Right Now," a studio song included on her 1992 Live! album. It's not that easy a song to get ahold of in a free internetty way (yootoob has only a juiced up NBA dance remix and a scratchy live version) and I've never found the lyrics, but you can hear it here on Rh*psody. Great song. Put it together with "Home" (Stephanie Mills), "Time Heals" (Todd Rundgren), "We Fall Down" (Donnie McClurkin), maybe "Ladies First (Queen Latifah) and "If You Love Me" (Brownstone), and you will be weepy but ready to face anything, your workaday life soundtracked like an uplifting movie montage.

[I have this thing about liking R&B songs with "all" in them: "All Right Now," "Alright" by Janet Jackson, "All Night Long" by Faith Evans, "All Day, All Night" by Stephanie Mills, "All Woman" by Lisa Stansfield...what's up that?]

Current fav smoothie recipe:

• frozen strawberries
• frozen mango
• frozen peach
• frozen dark cherries
• frozen raspberries
• 1 can cold berry seltzer
• 2 tablespoons flax seed
• 2 tablespoons wheat germ
• 1/3 c natural applesauce
• 1 tablespoon frozen lemonade concentrate

Use small amounts of fruits with a larger amount of the strawberries. Put everything in a blender, pour seltzer over, and let the whole thing melt a bit and equalize temperatures before blending. Makes enough for at least two large smoothies. Leftovers keep very well and in suspension, stored in a jug in the refrigerator.

Frugal cookery continues chez me. My freezer has become a well-oiled, well-used storage locker, no longer the languishing frosted hole of eventual return it once was. On-sale meat, frozen fruit, nuts, chocolate chips, and sorbet seem to have the most traffic. (Incredibly handy thing, sorbet: can use a spoonful to macerate fresh berries, to make a drink--stir into some sparkling water--to drop and let melt over a slice of unfrosted Wacky Cake, to add a little roundness to a smoothie, especially without dairy.)

That means that I have been free to engage in what I keep thinking of as the great grain use-up: plowing through the larger than needed stash of small brown bits in my cupboard. Not exactly sure how I ended up with so much, but at this point brown rice, quinoa, bulgur, barley, grits and oats have figured in most every meal recently. (I often end up thinking of that Mitch Hedberg quote: "Rice is great when you're hungry and you want 2,000 of something.") I'm pretty sick of quinoa, as nicely filling as it is. So far the biggest successes have been a brown rice and tuna salad (tuna is becoming a major protein go-to, although the fact that the organic kind is about 2000% better than the others is a problem, financially), scrambled eggs with barley and ground beef, and a bizarro potato/chicken/quinoa sludge that was really pretty good. A lot of the results are quite unattractive and look like they should be plopped in a wooden bowl, but they taste good. I have also managed to use up every vegetable I've bought recently, which impresses me, although I can't lie, I never made it through the pounds of coleslaw that I created last week. Another recent success, combining both grain and freezer: oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, make with dark brown sugar instead of light, tons of oatmeal, and three different kinds of chocolate chips (I like that when you store them in the freezer, you can just take some as needed). Incredibly yummy.

I took a break from cooking last night to try to find some good delivery New York style pizza in my neighborhood. Not successful. Bitter garlic taste, flat as the prairie, but not in a good floppy/crisp way, more cardboard. Being an Easy Cheese person makes me a fairly good pizza tester. Without a flood of melted cheese you get a good look--taste--of what's really going on. Can't hide in the land of Easy Cheese.

Finally saw Vicky Christina Barcelona. A mix of The Pleasure Seekers, Barcelona, Summer Lovers, The Green Ray, Talk to Her and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Or something. Which I would have known if I had paid any attention to it when it came out; as it was I had no idea what to picture. Not entirely sure what Cruz's (yes) good performance was in service of now that I've seen it, either.

on one aspect of the Regina Benjamin controversy

The controversy over the appointment of Dr. Regina Benjamin is shameful, from my point of view, and revealing of one aspect of how fat prejudice functions. Given that the woman's credentials satisfy in any direction you might slice them, how she looks must have really had to ring some bells to make people talk about it. Especially when Koop and Elders didn't.

I think the real reason Benjamin's size has gotten so much attention is that she has a chubby face. I don't think there would have been nearly the hubhub about this if she had the same body with a face that happened to be thinner. I'm not sure people would have noticed her body, period, which is a fairly conventional size 18-20, if that, not particularly readable in her basic black suit.

People--the media--demonstrate a real lack of "lipoliteracy" (as Mark Graham calls it) in reading images of fat people. People aren't that good at reading images in general, but fat bodies, which tend to be shown in very limited and particular ways, so most people (including other fat people) aren't well-practiced at understanding them, are generally pretty crudely read. There is an inability to distinguish body type from body size, to read relative size in an accurate way, to really see how light, angle, clothing and movement are affecting what they're seeing. To know what size other people really are.

Faces are, in a funny way, how people decide how fat someone is, how fat the rest of someone is. And one thing you notice quickly when you start really looking at fat people, at all people, is that people's faces don't necessarily represent how big (or small) they are. Especially images of faces. Faces can tell you something about a person, but a lot of fat people have fairly thin faces. And vice versa. There isn't a one-to-one corollary. There is a whole world of eating disorders sparked by chubby or round faces that don't match thin bodies.

The face is synecdoche, the repository for information about the whole body. And you can't "pass" if you have a chubby face (as in Benjamin's case). And in reading fat faces a kind of eugenics is employed. There are whole worlds of meaning instantly seen in double chins and chubby cheeks, in jowls and dimples and fat, in even small variations on all of this, most of them bad. Meaning that is drawn not just about the person but about the fatness or otherwise of the rest of the body. The fact that the image of the fat face isn't shown, highlighted, nearly as often as it really exists in this life gives it an extra shock and negative power.

The point here is not to lobby for continued judgement of other people's bodies, so long as it's done "correctly." It is to point out that part of what's so frustrating about the issue of body size in this country is that we don't even really know what we're seeing. It's not okay to be fat, but who knows what that is. "Fat" is one whole side of the bell curve, more than that, a million different things. To make intelligent distinctions, to describe something accurately, is to bring size into focus too much, to allow it to be. We want it to just go away.

The dude on Fox News who decided Dr. Benjamin was obese and therefore "lazy," for instance, was reacting in large part, I am convinced, to her face (her body doesn't even seem particularly visible in the press conference footage). Which seems (to some) to make her look sweet, kind, soft, older, less competitive...compromised. Weak. Lazy. Not authoritarian. Not hard-working. Not intelligent, not focused, not educated. Otherwise we could see it in her face, yes? Instead of the chub?

Dr. Benjamin is obviously, demonstrably, all these things: intelligent, focused, educated, devoted, swimming in credentials and press coverage of every kind to make the point if the other facts of her life don't. That this would be questioned as it has shows how much meaning body size has for people.

There are many other things to talk about with regard to this situation, most notably race: race, class, gender, age, the dominance of the visual media, the importance of looking a part, the way in which we are all scarred in some ways by the body wars. I think it's interesting, though, that body size is the arena in which people's reactions to her nomination have surfaced and have been, in fact, allowed to do so.

This commercial for Keefer's in Chicago (it's the second video)...urngh. Not so good. The voiceover begins: "In a city of famous steakhouses, you won't find Gibson at Gibson's; Morton at Morton's; Harry Caray at Harry Caray's," by way of setting up the fact that the Keefer is at Keefer's. But it's impossible not to think, yes, er, but...Arnie Morton and Harry Caray are dead, yo. Seems tacky.