it occurred to me as i angry-treadmilled to the tv news this afternoon that while i haven't formally attempted a 101 in 1001 ("complete 101 preset tasks in a period of 1001 days") list for nearly five years, i've probably managed to take down a bunch of items from my last one anyway—and i totally did! way to go, haphazard me!
original start date: 10 june 2012
original end date: 08 march 2015
items completed: 023
items remaining: 078
...and since then,
additional items completed: 14
[004]: visit pittsburgh [see 09.28.15]
boy howdy do we love the 'burgh: since that first fall trip in 2015, the missus and i have driven back out three more times. while item 014 ("visit mari in atlanta") is now impossible, she and her family are now PA-based, and we've taken down the great race (my all-time favorite 10K, a crowded but delightfully citywide thing) with them three times. ask for "pittsburgh, you're my kind of town" in my best springsteen growl if we see each other in person; it's even better than the songs i invent for the cats.
[026]: go to the opera [completed october 2015]
baby's first opera was tannhäuser at the met, and while an old-school, nearly-four-hour (plus three intermissions, as i recall) take on early wagner might not seem like the most intuitive call, the friend* who facilitated our extremely good seats (he used to represent performers and is tight with the folks who film and simulcast the met's performances in HD) also talked us through the teutonic shenanigans. we went on to see an utterly stunning magic flute at the teatro dell'opera di roma (i cried like a baby and got a moth tattoo a few days later, which was technically coincidental but still), and we've been back to the met with the same opera-ringer pal for pelléas et mélisande (debussy's only opera). i have worn the same thrifted balenciaga tent dress to all three, and, weirdly, have yet to wear the black velvet opera coat i found at a vintage store on our first trip to pittsburgh? guess we have to hit some more operas.
[031]: get my name printed in the new york times [completed 09.01.19]
my first and twitter names turned up as part of patricia lockwood's "live nude dads read the sunday paper" project, but that assembled poem was online-only, and c'mon, it's much more satisfying to have debuted thus. that was a journey: i convinced myself a dozen different times over the course of several months that the piece wouldn't run, despite universally supportive communication from my editor and joe's exhortations to, like, breathe into a paper bag and go to bed already. i have now accepted that it can't be taken away and am working on new pitches! the travel section would seem like the most natural fit, but i can't write for it, as i've taken press trips (which are strictly forbidden for its contributors). i considered a modern love writeup about the series of late-night DMs i got last summer from a guy who turned me down when i asked him to senior prom and wanted me to know a couple of decades later that he was wrong to have done so, but that seemed...fraught. inspired by "my so-karen life,"** i was thinking about rites of passage...which now seems to be on hiatus. that said, i am unfazed (and am also going to get off my ass and aim at the new yorker this year).
[039]: spend the night on a boat [see 08.25.17].
i've now hit the atlantic for CRESLI's three-day great south channel trip three years in a row and am addicted to both cetaceanspotting and turning in with the thrum of an engine under my belly and stars and spray on my back. that trio of trips was pretty bare-bones: i brought a sleeping bag, a plush peep, and a pillowcase, and i dragged my lumpy vinyl cot mattress up to the top deck of our temporarily-mostly-repurposed fishing boat as often as i could (every night but one so far, i think?). i love whale watching, but i also love the formal restrictions of spending extended time on a small vessel in unpredictable conditions; i love pelagic birds, a deck heaving under my flip-flops, brushing my teeth and spitting over the stern. joe has yet to join me on any of those trips, but he flew out as my plus-one for a working trip on a small ocean liner in northern europe last fall: we flew to berlin and spent a few days revisiting falafel and oktoberfest, then took a coach to rostock and swooped out for a week of danish and norwegian port-hopping. the jump from a craft with 60 passengers to one with 900*** is not insignificant, despite the prevalence of NPR enthusiasts on both in these cases: the latter was unquestionably a luxury cruise (with on-board history and astronomy pros, balconies and cashmere blankets for all, shitting-you-not edvard munch originals [on loan from museums] on the walls...you get the idea). i had never been on A Cruise, and i am not sorry i tried one; the peoplewatching was top-hole, and i appreciated the opportunity to snack on destinations we might like to revisit. the sleep quality, ironically, ended up being comparable to what i've experienced on my CRESLI trips, albeit for reasons at the other end of the spectrum: at one point i acquired a wool blanket that pleased me so well that i was too excited to nap.**** we are unlikely to take another cruise, but i would consider recommending one on that particular line to, say, my parents, if they were intent on that particular sort of trip. tl;dr: more (hopefully small and/or eco-friendly) boats in the '20s.
[043]: spend a night in the hudson valley [completed 09.18]
when did we first go to the hudson valley? have we met? what is time? joe reminds me that we drove out to hudson for the afternoon when we spent a long weekend in narrowsburg in the fall of 2015, and that we didn't actually spend the night there until september 2018, when we shared an airbnb with friends for basilica soundscape (a weekend music festival) and were accosted by an extremely friendly tuxedo cat whose tag announced him to be BLACK BAT. we headed back again on a road trip last may and stayed at tiger house, a former hunting lodge that was a b&b at the time (i think it's now closed?). i am exceedingly fond of spotty dog (a bookstore/bar) and BLACK BAT, obviously. we did not solve a murder mystery at tiger house and should probably buy it so we can fix that.
[046]: swim with the coney island polar bear club [see 01.02.16].
it felt a bit like cheating to join the new year's day plunge in 2016, as coney island was positively balmy that morning compared to early januaries past and since, but look: i was pretty goddamn cold anyway (it wasn't the ocean itself, it was the interminable waiting to run into the ocean that killed me; i felt much better afterward, what with the adrenaline and the beer. one member of our foursome, previously unknown to me, is now a semi-regular Political Yelling at Bars Companion of mine; another was already an ice-bath devotee and has since gone to poland and iceland to celebrate wim "the iceman" hof's cold-therapy method. pro tips: bring someone who doesn't want to strip down and jump in the water with you but is willing to watch your clothes and towel and give you someplace to run when you're staggering back like an idiot, and wear thick socks.
[054]: go camping [completed 09.16]
i have yet to attempt a trip that doesn't involve running an all-night trail relay race at the same time, but the running shouldn't invalidate the camping, should it? on that first soggy weekend in new jersey for ragnar trail wawayanda lake, the terrain was so muddy that i'd crash in my diminutive leopard-print tent (you're a goddamn wonder, apartment tent) with my feet through the flap, exposed to the rain. with four ragnars now under my belt, i think i'm ready at last for regular camping, but i'm bringing The Grim Runner (my little angel of death with a custom pink sweatband) anyway.
[058]: visit the new york botanical garden [see 08.09.16]
guessing it won't surprise you that i found my trip to see the corpse flower in 2016 significantly more exciting than a trip to see the holiday train show. what can i say? i like fake corpses and real trains, thanks.
[078]: run a (public) 10K [completed 12.15?]
i've lost count of 10Ks, but i know that at least five have been on flat, scenic, PR-friendly roosevelt island (which should be an easy ride on the F train, but in 2020 even i can admit that there are no more easy rides on the F train; now i usually get there via the tramway and traumatize fellow passengers with my Run Funk, unavoidable in such a small space). i remind my septuagenarian friend and fellow bookstore volunteer A, a former UN official and longtime island resident, that i am both protecting and stalking him via these 10Ks, and he seems pleased.
[087]: visit the new york city tenement museum [completed...i have no idea, i pass it like every day and i think i'm trying to forget the visit to protect myself]
what's nastier than a doll-sized tram over the east river when you've just finished a 10K? the new york city tenement museum between march and october. i love my neighborhood and i love that earnest grad students introduce it to tourists, but i'm tired of sharing the sidewalk with all of them. get out of here, butter.
[090]: beat my new york times sunday crossword time (18 min)
i'm down to 11:35, which is not too shabby! that said, i hadn't read a thing about the american crossword puzzle tournament before registering and booking a hotel room for it and—get this—genuinely thought i could roll up and win. tell my family i loved them.
[096]: go to the hamptons
i think we've aged out of the sharing-a-group-house-for-the-weekend stage of engaging with the hamptons, and that's for the best, as the lunch, shopping, and gas-stationing stops i've made en route to montauk and back have been less than inspirational. montauk i like very much, though i'm conscious of being the sort of summer person who's helped make it too expensive for families to vacation there in recent years, and i'm not prepared to pay several hundred dollars a night for a long weekend in a fashionably-upcycled motel. i have made my peace with this.
[098]: figure out a wall treatment for the kitchen
i bought a bunch of black oil paint pens a few years ago and have been late-night doodling from the floor up ever since. it is immensely satisfying.
[099]: visit three new-to-me states
kinda hazy on this one, but i know kentucky, louisiana, mississippi, missouri, and north carolina are all in there. it's like we have a car now or something!
*kevin has the best ideas: he also organized our Black Tie Bar Crawl a few years ago, when we all dressed up within an inch of our lives and hit la grenouille and the four seasons (RIP). we would have kept crawling, but when we got to the four seasons's bar and asked for glasses of champagne, they just...kept coming, and we hadn't had dinner, so we fled to sakagura for ballast. fun fact: joe and i had dinner at the four seasons (dressed less formally, as it happens) after getting legally hitched (prior to our proper oxford wedding) in 2006.
**i enjoyed "my so-karen life" so much that i went to follow the writer, sarah miller, on twitter—and discovered that she's been following me for some time, which made me feel like a million bucks. a solid reminder that i should be following liberally.
***a 900-person cruise ship is considered a small cruise ship: the largest liners in the world accommodate more than 6,000 passengers.
****full disclosure: i bought that blanket for the cats (who appreciate it as much as i do and are much better at napping).
Showing posts with label 101 in 1001 {III}. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 101 in 1001 {III}. Show all posts
06.16.14
101 in 1001 {III}: 070 make beer [ongoing]
my night of triumph was at hand: after saving up and sanitizing eight empty swing-top grolsch bottles (arduous; grolsch is not very good), acquiring a brooklyn brew shop kit with ingredients for a gallon of their warrior double ipa, mashing in, collecting and boiling wort, adding hops, pitching yeast, watching the beer-beast freak out on our counter for three days, installing an airlock, some other steps i'm probably forgetting, and letting the growler of whatever it was at that point become self-aware in a dark corner of our bedroom closet for two weeks, it was time to siphon and carbonate and bottle and promote my homemade beer, which would be the finest beer in all the land. i would call it grand street brown-brown, perhaps, in honor of matty, who supervised and inspired my efforts à la brooklyn brewery's beloved monster. i sanitized and prepared my racking cane and tubing, realized i hadn't yet prepared the honey and water mixture in the bottom of my sanitized pot, spilled a bunch of honey on the cat (who had started drinking the sanitizer when my back was turned, then panicked and scattered my bottles when i caught him at it), fled to retrieve the growler from the bedroom closet, and found that a pile of laundry had snapped the airlock clean off at the growler's open mouth, which explains why our clothes have smelled so spooky this week. a hop-addled moth traced a crooked spiral out of the closet.
my night of triumph was at hand: after saving up and sanitizing eight empty swing-top grolsch bottles (arduous; grolsch is not very good), acquiring a brooklyn brew shop kit with ingredients for a gallon of their warrior double ipa, mashing in, collecting and boiling wort, adding hops, pitching yeast, watching the beer-beast freak out on our counter for three days, installing an airlock, some other steps i'm probably forgetting, and letting the growler of whatever it was at that point become self-aware in a dark corner of our bedroom closet for two weeks, it was time to siphon and carbonate and bottle and promote my homemade beer, which would be the finest beer in all the land. i would call it grand street brown-brown, perhaps, in honor of matty, who supervised and inspired my efforts à la brooklyn brewery's beloved monster. i sanitized and prepared my racking cane and tubing, realized i hadn't yet prepared the honey and water mixture in the bottom of my sanitized pot, spilled a bunch of honey on the cat (who had started drinking the sanitizer when my back was turned, then panicked and scattered my bottles when i caught him at it), fled to retrieve the growler from the bedroom closet, and found that a pile of laundry had snapped the airlock clean off at the growler's open mouth, which explains why our clothes have smelled so spooky this week. a hop-addled moth traced a crooked spiral out of the closet.
03.11.14
101 in 1001 {III}: 022 see at least 6 more of shakespeare's plays for the first time [completed 02.21.14]
at some point in the '80s a community theatre company came to my elementary school and performed the pyramus-and-thisbe scene from a midsummer night's dream; i tingled both with the dead leg i always got from wearing a skirt on assembly day and having to sit sidesaddle on the carpeted multi-purpose-room floor and with the first stirrings of a serious and lifelong shakespeare jones. for the next decade i tended to scratch the itch with rental movies and questionable summer stock productions, but things got and stayed serious when i went away to college and discovered that no one would prevent me from registering for every shakespeare and shakespeare-adjacent class i could find. joe and i turned into a couple when our overseas program sent us to stratford for shakespeare's birthday and a few dozen royal shakespeare company productions; our friend jacob read sonnet 116 at our wedding. i'll fold in another playwright every now and again if i must—we roll out for shakespeare in the park twice every summer whether the second show is more shakespeare or, like, into the woods (eh) or hair (FAH), and we're turning into regulars at playwrights horizons—but i have weathered a lot of midsummers at this point, is what i'm saying. i wondered if six "new" plays could really be new to me.
happily, they can; having to chase down happenings like a matinee performance of the national theatre's fantastic post-financial-crash timon of athens when we were in london for a wedding and a crazily-edited international-collaboration version of antony and cleopatra set in colonial haiti* has been good for me. i now know, for example, that "timon" rhymes with "simon" and not "limón," and that london retirees love eating ice cream super-loudly more than i have ever loved anything. i have new favorite language on stoicism (from antony and cleopatra, act IV, scene 14)...
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 how many of shakespeare's plays have you seen performed live?
02 the worst theatrical production you've ever seen?** the best?
03 would you be more likely to eat at a matinee performance than at an evening performance? (yes, i'm asking about eating in theaters again.)
*that one was just down the street at the public's snazzy new HQ on lafayette, but you get my drift.
**one of my shakespeare profs, the inimitable charles lyons, told a wonderful story about a production in which the beleaguered actor playing hamlet was unable to stab through gertrude's bedroom draperies in order to kill polonius and was finally encouraged by the audience to beat him to death.
at some point in the '80s a community theatre company came to my elementary school and performed the pyramus-and-thisbe scene from a midsummer night's dream; i tingled both with the dead leg i always got from wearing a skirt on assembly day and having to sit sidesaddle on the carpeted multi-purpose-room floor and with the first stirrings of a serious and lifelong shakespeare jones. for the next decade i tended to scratch the itch with rental movies and questionable summer stock productions, but things got and stayed serious when i went away to college and discovered that no one would prevent me from registering for every shakespeare and shakespeare-adjacent class i could find. joe and i turned into a couple when our overseas program sent us to stratford for shakespeare's birthday and a few dozen royal shakespeare company productions; our friend jacob read sonnet 116 at our wedding. i'll fold in another playwright every now and again if i must—we roll out for shakespeare in the park twice every summer whether the second show is more shakespeare or, like, into the woods (eh) or hair (FAH), and we're turning into regulars at playwrights horizons—but i have weathered a lot of midsummers at this point, is what i'm saying. i wondered if six "new" plays could really be new to me.
happily, they can; having to chase down happenings like a matinee performance of the national theatre's fantastic post-financial-crash timon of athens when we were in london for a wedding and a crazily-edited international-collaboration version of antony and cleopatra set in colonial haiti* has been good for me. i now know, for example, that "timon" rhymes with "simon" and not "limón," and that london retirees love eating ice cream super-loudly more than i have ever loved anything. i have new favorite language on stoicism (from antony and cleopatra, act IV, scene 14)...
Nay, good my fellows, do not please sharp fate...and i know never to cast a semi-mechanical water snake in a death scene (so distracting!). i have enjoyed myself immensely.
To grace it with your sorrows: bid that welcome
Which comes to punish us, and we punish it
Seeming to bear it lightly. Take me up:
I have led you oft: carry me now, good friends,
And have my thanks for all.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 how many of shakespeare's plays have you seen performed live?
02 the worst theatrical production you've ever seen?** the best?
03 would you be more likely to eat at a matinee performance than at an evening performance? (yes, i'm asking about eating in theaters again.)
*that one was just down the street at the public's snazzy new HQ on lafayette, but you get my drift.
**one of my shakespeare profs, the inimitable charles lyons, told a wonderful story about a production in which the beleaguered actor playing hamlet was unable to stab through gertrude's bedroom draperies in order to kill polonius and was finally encouraged by the audience to beat him to death.
11.14.13
101 in 1001 {III}: 008 take a knife-skills class [completed 11.03.13]
i thought i wanted to learn to cut things efficiently and safely because joe (foe of onions) always complains that i don't dice things finely enough and because i seem to lose the tip of a finger to a laughably-uncomplicated prep job (this year it was chopping parsley; sorry about that, right index) once a year or so. those are solid reasons to learn to cut things efficiently and safely, and brooklyn kitchen's celebrated class addressed them; i've now spent substantial time practicing the previously-scorned not-removing-the-stem-of-the-onion method, and i now know to make a tiger claw with my non-cutting hand before i get to work on, say, a carrot, and that i should be honing my knife before and after every big job (if you look at the blade of your knife straight on and can see reflected light, it needs to be honed). i also know, thanks to the preview of the advanced knife skills class to which we were treated at the end of our class, that i'm unlikely to become one of those rare and mysterious vegetarians who can prepare meat for others, as the spectacle of our teacher taking a chicken apart on a cutting board directly and graphically in front of me was at least sixteen times more disturbing than the small-stage production of titus andronicus i saw at the public two winters ago (in which a small child wandered around puncturing a lumpy plastic bag full of blood each time a character was dispatched); you omnivores terrify me.
what i now realize i actually wanted was to see someone chop an onion really, really fast, as they do on foodie-reality-tv shows like top chef. i am not a very good pupil as a general proposition, and i am especially lousy at following right-handed people in demonstrations: i have the visual-spatial intelligence of a baby carrot and a short attention span, so i get confused and promptly move on to thoughts of, say, how i might make myself octopus smoking slippers* or teach steve to jump through a hoop instead of digging in and figuring out how to make my clumsy old left hand do the thing i'm expected to learn to do. (i'm a bad teacher for similar reasons, and wonder every now and again if all those archery "lessons" i gave as a girl scout camp counselor ever led to fatalities.) i did not see anyone chop an onion really, really fast (our teacher was far too responsible to encourage us to go benihana on our vegetables), and it's unlikely i myself will be chopping an onion really, really fast at any point in the near future, but i'm not sorry i froggered out to north williamsburg in the middle of the new york marathon to learn knife skills: i'll remember the tiger claw, i now have a freezer full of wonkily-cubed stock ingredients, and i also have a class handout i can consult if i ever develop the self-discipline to sit down and puzzle out diagrams for more than a few minutes at a time. sometimes that's enough.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 did i make it sound like i do all the cooking when i mentioned joe's prissy onion thing?
02 do you know how to take a chicken apart?
03 were/are you a good pupil?
04 were/are you a good archer?
05 when did you last take a class?
06 if you were to customize a pair of smoking slippers, how would you do it?
*they are in the works and will be boss.
i thought i wanted to learn to cut things efficiently and safely because joe (foe of onions) always complains that i don't dice things finely enough and because i seem to lose the tip of a finger to a laughably-uncomplicated prep job (this year it was chopping parsley; sorry about that, right index) once a year or so. those are solid reasons to learn to cut things efficiently and safely, and brooklyn kitchen's celebrated class addressed them; i've now spent substantial time practicing the previously-scorned not-removing-the-stem-of-the-onion method, and i now know to make a tiger claw with my non-cutting hand before i get to work on, say, a carrot, and that i should be honing my knife before and after every big job (if you look at the blade of your knife straight on and can see reflected light, it needs to be honed). i also know, thanks to the preview of the advanced knife skills class to which we were treated at the end of our class, that i'm unlikely to become one of those rare and mysterious vegetarians who can prepare meat for others, as the spectacle of our teacher taking a chicken apart on a cutting board directly and graphically in front of me was at least sixteen times more disturbing than the small-stage production of titus andronicus i saw at the public two winters ago (in which a small child wandered around puncturing a lumpy plastic bag full of blood each time a character was dispatched); you omnivores terrify me.
what i now realize i actually wanted was to see someone chop an onion really, really fast, as they do on foodie-reality-tv shows like top chef. i am not a very good pupil as a general proposition, and i am especially lousy at following right-handed people in demonstrations: i have the visual-spatial intelligence of a baby carrot and a short attention span, so i get confused and promptly move on to thoughts of, say, how i might make myself octopus smoking slippers* or teach steve to jump through a hoop instead of digging in and figuring out how to make my clumsy old left hand do the thing i'm expected to learn to do. (i'm a bad teacher for similar reasons, and wonder every now and again if all those archery "lessons" i gave as a girl scout camp counselor ever led to fatalities.) i did not see anyone chop an onion really, really fast (our teacher was far too responsible to encourage us to go benihana on our vegetables), and it's unlikely i myself will be chopping an onion really, really fast at any point in the near future, but i'm not sorry i froggered out to north williamsburg in the middle of the new york marathon to learn knife skills: i'll remember the tiger claw, i now have a freezer full of wonkily-cubed stock ingredients, and i also have a class handout i can consult if i ever develop the self-discipline to sit down and puzzle out diagrams for more than a few minutes at a time. sometimes that's enough.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 did i make it sound like i do all the cooking when i mentioned joe's prissy onion thing?
02 do you know how to take a chicken apart?
03 were/are you a good pupil?
04 were/are you a good archer?
05 when did you last take a class?
06 if you were to customize a pair of smoking slippers, how would you do it?
*they are in the works and will be boss.
10.23.13
101 in 1001 {III}: 037 read three library books [completed 10.13.13]
III: OUTRAGE, ARNALDUR INDRIDASON. in some ways outrage, an icelandic thriller, seems hyperconscious of the nordic-crime-fiction juggernaut that is stieg larsson's millennium trilogy: the title refers to rape (the first of larsson's books was called men who hate women in swedish), and indriðason's leading man, crotchety old inspector erlendur, has gone on a vision quest in eastern iceland and left reykjavik's latest murder mystery to elínborg, a female member of the reykjavik police force (and a secondary character in indriðason's previous novels). in other, more important ways, it's like that episode of space ghost coast to coast where space ghost follows an ant for ten minutes: icelanders, bless their hearts, dance like there's nobody watching. witness a stakeout with elínborg outside edvard's house (edvard might or might not know who killed runólfur, a creepy guy found dead in his apartment in a tiny san francisco tee shirt):
like indriðason's novels which are not jar city (his first inspector erlendur book, far and away his best), outrage doesn't quite tweak the wrinkles in one's brain which blockbuster english-language murder-mystery-thrillers traditionally tweak: the pacing is all over the place, the translation thumps unexpectedly into potholes of british slang, and the case itself is of limited interest. then again, i've never really gone to them for that; i started showing up for a cheap iceland fix, and now that i've been to iceland a few times, i keep coming back for (the weird-ass dancing and) the little revelations of cultural character. halldór laxness's nobel-winning, majestic-as-shit independent people is a gorgeous way to think about icelanders, but one should leaven that impression with pop culture, i think. one should always leaven with pop.
III: OUTRAGE, ARNALDUR INDRIDASON. in some ways outrage, an icelandic thriller, seems hyperconscious of the nordic-crime-fiction juggernaut that is stieg larsson's millennium trilogy: the title refers to rape (the first of larsson's books was called men who hate women in swedish), and indriðason's leading man, crotchety old inspector erlendur, has gone on a vision quest in eastern iceland and left reykjavik's latest murder mystery to elínborg, a female member of the reykjavik police force (and a secondary character in indriðason's previous novels). in other, more important ways, it's like that episode of space ghost coast to coast where space ghost follows an ant for ten minutes: icelanders, bless their hearts, dance like there's nobody watching. witness a stakeout with elínborg outside edvard's house (edvard might or might not know who killed runólfur, a creepy guy found dead in his apartment in a tiny san francisco tee shirt):
The car was chilly but she did not want to keep the engine running and risk drawing attention to her presence. She was also reluctant to pollute the atmosphere more than necessary. She never left the engine running when the car was stationary - it was practically the only cast-iron rule she observed as a driver.elínborg is as methodical as erlendur is erratic, and iceland's impeccable national databases and tiny population suit her style of police work perfectly: when one of runólfur's neighbors mentions she saw a man limp down the street in a leg brace on the night of the murder, she tracks down and interviews each and every male icelander of a certain age who had polio. she also finds a woman's scarf beneath runólfur's bed and notices that it smells like tandoori; alors, time to consult the one place in reykjavik that sells tandoori pots. this is a particularly lucky break, as elínborg knows it well.
Perhaps [the mystery woman] worked in a restaurant that served tandoori dishes. Elínborg knew something about tandoori cookery, and had even included some tandoori dishes in the cookery book that she had published. She had read up on tandoori cuisine and felt pretty well-informed about it. She owned two different clay tandoori pots. In India they would traditionally be heated in a pit filled with burning charcoal so that the meat was cooked evenly from all sides at a high temperature. Elínborg had occasionally buried a tandoori pot in her back garden in the authentic manner, but usually she put it in the oven or heated it over charcoal on an old barbecue. The crucial factor was the marinade, for which Elínborg used a combination of spices, blending them to taste with plain yoghurt. For a red colour she added ground annatto seed; for yellow, saffron. She generally experimented with a mixture of cayenne pepper, coriander, ginger and garlic, or with a garam masala that she made herself by using roasted or ground cardamom, cumin, cinnamon, garlic and black pepper, with a little nutmeg. She had also been trying out variations using Icelandic herbs such as wild thyme, angelica root, dandelion leaves and lovage. She would rub the marinade into the meat - chicken or pork - and leave it for several hours before it went into the tandoori pot. sometimes a little of the marinade would splash on the hot coals, bringing out more strongly the tangy tandoori fragrance that Elínborg had smelt on the shawl. She wondered if the woman they were looking for might have a job in Indian cookery. Or perhaps, like Elínborg, she was simply interested in Indian food, or even specifically in tandoori dishes. She too might have a tandoori pot in her kitchen, along with all the spices that made the dish so mouth-watering.wild icelandic herbs in tandoori, by the by, are delicious; take it from me, i've been to austur-indíafjelagið twice.
like indriðason's novels which are not jar city (his first inspector erlendur book, far and away his best), outrage doesn't quite tweak the wrinkles in one's brain which blockbuster english-language murder-mystery-thrillers traditionally tweak: the pacing is all over the place, the translation thumps unexpectedly into potholes of british slang, and the case itself is of limited interest. then again, i've never really gone to them for that; i started showing up for a cheap iceland fix, and now that i've been to iceland a few times, i keep coming back for (the weird-ass dancing and) the little revelations of cultural character. halldór laxness's nobel-winning, majestic-as-shit independent people is a gorgeous way to think about icelanders, but one should leaven that impression with pop culture, i think. one should always leaven with pop.
10.14.13
101 in 1001 {III}: 037 read three library books [ongoing]
II: RIVINGTON WAS OURS: LADY GAGA, THE LOWER EAST SIDE, AND THE PRIME OF OUR LIVES, BRENDAN JAY SULLIVAN. hats off to the new york public library for hooking me up with books i don't want to purchase and install at my apartment and am unlikely to find at my office! it served me well with jon ronson's psychopath test and served me even better with rivington was ours, a DJ/bartender's casual memoir of life among the beautiful people, lady gaga in particular, on the lower east side (i.e. our 'hood) circa 2006. my only real beef with library books thus far, standard used-book potential for bed bug infestation aside,* is that i have to read them straight through right away to avoid late fines, which is sort of annoying when, say, one wishes to skitter between an old copy of gilead from one's mother-in-law, the big ol' vampire novel one lugs back and forth on the subway to decompress over the course of the week one is shipping the december issue at the office, the new yorker, and the isadora duncan autobiography that makes one wonder if one speaks english as well as one thought one did.** that said, i'm not sure one is meant to linger over sullivan's prose.
and what of the lower east side? as we all know, memoirs of this sort are all secretly or not-so-secretly love letters to the city itself, right? sullivan spills a bit of ink describing his fragrant commute through "big trouble in little chinatown" on the way to the B/D station at grand and chrystie (like a lot of people who spend the evening on the lower east side, he doesn't actually live there), a bit more on an afterparty for the killers at motor city (good night sweet bar: and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!), and quite a lot on an awkwardly-telescoped vespa ride through central park to gaga's parents' place on the upper west side (of course he has a vespa). that last passage in particular feels like filler, and it is; brendan jay sullivan wants you to know how well he knew lady gaga and how highly other people think of him, and that's about it. there's nothing wrong with wanting those things, but if one is to be a writer's writer, one would want the former to be someone else, yes? this is my theory.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 if you are a book-borrower, what sort of books do you borrow? do you find you need to rush through them?
02 who is shakespeare's finest character?
03 have you ever referred to a chinatown as "big trouble in little chinatown"?
04 if a pop star told you she'd heard you're well-endowed, would you mention that in your memoir?
05 is it ever OK to give chapters song-lyric titles?
*bed bugs love used books, people. if you bring one home, do yourself the favor of throwing it in the oven at 115 for an hour (they also die at temperatures below 26 degrees, but most freezers don't get that cold).
**holy shit, isadora duncan.
***spoiler: not much.
****"[M]y third-time's-a-charm full-length manuscript The Confessions of Mercutio—a retelling of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. To tackle the great work, I took Shakespeare's finest character and Romeo's best friend, a longwinded drunk with a knack for getting into situations, and gave him free reign of Verona."
II: RIVINGTON WAS OURS: LADY GAGA, THE LOWER EAST SIDE, AND THE PRIME OF OUR LIVES, BRENDAN JAY SULLIVAN. hats off to the new york public library for hooking me up with books i don't want to purchase and install at my apartment and am unlikely to find at my office! it served me well with jon ronson's psychopath test and served me even better with rivington was ours, a DJ/bartender's casual memoir of life among the beautiful people, lady gaga in particular, on the lower east side (i.e. our 'hood) circa 2006. my only real beef with library books thus far, standard used-book potential for bed bug infestation aside,* is that i have to read them straight through right away to avoid late fines, which is sort of annoying when, say, one wishes to skitter between an old copy of gilead from one's mother-in-law, the big ol' vampire novel one lugs back and forth on the subway to decompress over the course of the week one is shipping the december issue at the office, the new yorker, and the isadora duncan autobiography that makes one wonder if one speaks english as well as one thought one did.** that said, i'm not sure one is meant to linger over sullivan's prose.
On our first date I was so nervous that I blurted out, "So, Nikki, tell me, what are your hopes and dreams?" I had hoped to disqualify her, to hear she was boring or stupid or in graduate school. I had hoped to find just one reason that I could quit staring at her, to stop imagining how much of my life I'd change just to make room for more of her in my world.***sadly, though the beautiful nikki is a lingerie entrepreneur and not a grad student, she isn't nearly compelling enough for sullivan (per gary shteyngart [who in turn must have lost a terribly high-stakes poker game to have had to deliver such a blurb],"a writer's writer. yes, he's that good."), who prefers to spend his hours out from behind the bar or the turntables with gaga, a young "musician" with extremely compelling eyes ("Her eyes sparkled like disco balls." "Her eyes were glowing like bright factory windows, her mind inside chugging along, excited by the noise of production." "She had an emptiness in her eyes and if you looked you wouldn't find her." "Her humorless eyes were pools that hovered just below thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit."). despite the sweet nothings they exchange at sullivan's obligatory twenty-fifth birthday party at the hotel chelsea (sigh), nikki leaves him to his karl lagerfeld-esque imagery ("I remembered the crisp air and the expressionless leather on all of our friends' jackets") and his lovelorn nights of blistering art theory with gaga ("If you thought she was a bit dumb, it was probably because she thought you were not that bright and didn't try to say anything over your head.")
She told me she was waiting tables ever since she quit designing lingerie for a bigger company. Now she wanted to start her own lingerie company with a partner who'd worked for Victoria's Secret. They would launch in February.
When she turned the question on me, I answered truthfully about my secret writings.**** Afterward we looked into each other's eyes like two lost sailors who first sighted land.
and what of the lower east side? as we all know, memoirs of this sort are all secretly or not-so-secretly love letters to the city itself, right? sullivan spills a bit of ink describing his fragrant commute through "big trouble in little chinatown" on the way to the B/D station at grand and chrystie (like a lot of people who spend the evening on the lower east side, he doesn't actually live there), a bit more on an afterparty for the killers at motor city (good night sweet bar: and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!), and quite a lot on an awkwardly-telescoped vespa ride through central park to gaga's parents' place on the upper west side (of course he has a vespa). that last passage in particular feels like filler, and it is; brendan jay sullivan wants you to know how well he knew lady gaga and how highly other people think of him, and that's about it. there's nothing wrong with wanting those things, but if one is to be a writer's writer, one would want the former to be someone else, yes? this is my theory.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 if you are a book-borrower, what sort of books do you borrow? do you find you need to rush through them?
02 who is shakespeare's finest character?
03 have you ever referred to a chinatown as "big trouble in little chinatown"?
04 if a pop star told you she'd heard you're well-endowed, would you mention that in your memoir?
05 is it ever OK to give chapters song-lyric titles?
*bed bugs love used books, people. if you bring one home, do yourself the favor of throwing it in the oven at 115 for an hour (they also die at temperatures below 26 degrees, but most freezers don't get that cold).
**holy shit, isadora duncan.
***spoiler: not much.
****"[M]y third-time's-a-charm full-length manuscript The Confessions of Mercutio—a retelling of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. To tackle the great work, I took Shakespeare's finest character and Romeo's best friend, a longwinded drunk with a knack for getting into situations, and gave him free reign of Verona."
10.01.13
101 in 1001 {III}: 037 read three library books [ongoing]
I: THE PSYCHOPATH TEST, JON RONSON. to decide how i feel about jon ronson, i need to give a name to what i think he's doing. i read lost at sea, a collection of his articles for the guardian, and sort of concluded that he's a middlebrow comic nonfiction writer; his research doesn't seem especially rigorous, but that's par for the course with short personal essays, and it's entertaining stuff. the psychopath test (subtitled "a journey through the madness industry") reframes things a bit: it's a book-length treatment of a single theme, anchored by the application of a checklist of psychopathic traits to subjects like a ruthless business executive, a former haitian death squad leader, a man who claims he faked psychopathy to avoid jail, members of the media (himself especially), and so on. he also considers how the media and pharmaceutical industry benefit from mental illness and/or perceptions of it, and, er, hunts down the publisher of a really fancy zine. he's often very funny, but he's also misleading and unsatisfying when he ventures into dark places with a light touch. he presents some wild old psychiatric research on mental institutions,* for example, without explaining that its methodology was subsequently and definitively torn apart.** at what point does curating information in that way become irresponsible?
in his review of the book, fellow guardian contributor will self notes that "at his best, ronson is one of the finest comic writers working today," then implies in the nicest possible way that pop scholarship like his might be kind of horrifying.*** i don't think ronson is a monster, professional and personal feelings about responsible research aside; i do think that someone who makes $250,000 ("double that in a good year," as he tells us in "amber waves of green," a piece he wrote for GQ) should hire a straight-up research assistant if he wants to be taken seriously. for better or for worse, this gal expects copious footnotes in her comic nonfiction (i miss you, DFW).
*such as david rosenhan's "on being sane in insane places," published in science in 1973, in which he and seven other subjects faked their way into inpatient treatment for insanity and were given antipsychotic drugs and held for an average of nineteen days, even though they behaved completely normally after admission.
**a friend adjacent to "the madness industry" who read the psychopath test at the same time i did sent me two pieces from a 1975 issue of the journal of abnormal psychology: robert l. spitzer's "on pseudoscience in science, logic in remission, and psychiatric diagnosis: a critique of rosenhan's 'on being sane in insane places" and theodore millon's "reflections on rosenhan's 'on being sane in insane places.'"
***that courtly criticism, in part:
I: THE PSYCHOPATH TEST, JON RONSON. to decide how i feel about jon ronson, i need to give a name to what i think he's doing. i read lost at sea, a collection of his articles for the guardian, and sort of concluded that he's a middlebrow comic nonfiction writer; his research doesn't seem especially rigorous, but that's par for the course with short personal essays, and it's entertaining stuff. the psychopath test (subtitled "a journey through the madness industry") reframes things a bit: it's a book-length treatment of a single theme, anchored by the application of a checklist of psychopathic traits to subjects like a ruthless business executive, a former haitian death squad leader, a man who claims he faked psychopathy to avoid jail, members of the media (himself especially), and so on. he also considers how the media and pharmaceutical industry benefit from mental illness and/or perceptions of it, and, er, hunts down the publisher of a really fancy zine. he's often very funny, but he's also misleading and unsatisfying when he ventures into dark places with a light touch. he presents some wild old psychiatric research on mental institutions,* for example, without explaining that its methodology was subsequently and definitively torn apart.** at what point does curating information in that way become irresponsible?
in his review of the book, fellow guardian contributor will self notes that "at his best, ronson is one of the finest comic writers working today," then implies in the nicest possible way that pop scholarship like his might be kind of horrifying.*** i don't think ronson is a monster, professional and personal feelings about responsible research aside; i do think that someone who makes $250,000 ("double that in a good year," as he tells us in "amber waves of green," a piece he wrote for GQ) should hire a straight-up research assistant if he wants to be taken seriously. for better or for worse, this gal expects copious footnotes in her comic nonfiction (i miss you, DFW).
*such as david rosenhan's "on being sane in insane places," published in science in 1973, in which he and seven other subjects faked their way into inpatient treatment for insanity and were given antipsychotic drugs and held for an average of nineteen days, even though they behaved completely normally after admission.
**a friend adjacent to "the madness industry" who read the psychopath test at the same time i did sent me two pieces from a 1975 issue of the journal of abnormal psychology: robert l. spitzer's "on pseudoscience in science, logic in remission, and psychiatric diagnosis: a critique of rosenhan's 'on being sane in insane places" and theodore millon's "reflections on rosenhan's 'on being sane in insane places.'"
***that courtly criticism, in part:
So mild – and, dare I say, humane – is the tendency of Ronson's satire that when he ventures out into the world of political extremists, or military fanatics, or psychiatric persecutors, he is determined to see the nebech in everyone – until they're revealed as shlemiels. But just as there was a break-point in [Ronson's] The Men Who Stare at Goats, one that occurred when the heirs to the new age military theorists actually began torturing Iraqi detainees with hideous ditties from kids' TV shows, so there's a break-point in The Psychopath Test when this reader, at least, began to think: these people aren't merely shlemiels, they're utter bastards. From then on the humour is sucked out of the text into the vacuum of a dark and cruel space.****and then it doesn't! many of the sources in his bibliography are secondary (books and magazine articles); a fact checker who handed over backup like that would be unlikely to work for me again.
[...]
Naturally, I don't discount the possibility that Ronson is only too aware of what he's up to here – he's undoubtedly a clever and thoughtful man. By constructing his books so that they start off achingly funny then at a certain juncture become naggingly painful, he does indeed force us to think more deeply about the subject at hand. This, surely, is all that contemporary satire can achieve: in a world with a relativistic moral compass, it can't enjoin us to do the right thing – for which there is no longer any consensus – but only to think about what the right thing might possibly be. That Ronson's books, rather than providing us with the material we need to think about these questions, can only indicate the further reading we should do,**** is also mandated by his authorial persona.
09.16.13
101 in 1001 {III}: 027 go to the bronx zoo [completed 09.15.13]
i spend a lot of time thinking about animal parks, which is unsurprising, given the rigors of maintaining ye olde birthday cakes for animals tumblr (it is no picnic: the panda photos really start to bleed together after the third or fourth month, and the internet still seems to lack interest in fêting reptiles*). ethics of anthropomorphism aside, we have a complicated history: when i was growing up in southern california, local heavies included a drive-through safari at which an african elephant broke free, killed one of her trainers, and forced the closure of two freeways; the san diego zoo (linked in the early '90s to hunting farms); and sea world (enough said). irresponsible animal parks are nightmarish, but conscientious ones are invaluable to conservationists. the bronx zoo is the flagship urban animal park of the wildlife conservation society, a nonprofit which receives excellent ratings from groups like charity navigator and kicks ass when it comes to, say, taking care of little snow leopards. we made a point of visiting the zoo this weekend because they've just started letting the public have a look at this five-month-old fellow, asleep with his mum five feet away from us in my photo; he's the firstborn son of leo, a leopard cub who was orphaned in the mountains of pakistan back in 2005 and rescued and hand-fed by a shepherd (seriously). thank you, bronx zoo, for being the sort of animal park that spearheads worldwide leopard-saving efforts and not the sort of animal park that plunks its big-cat exhibits right next to a shrieking merry-go-round (i'm looking at you, national zoo). the zoo's extensive grounds seemed to suit all of the animals we visited, actually, and once i have figured out how to hang out with tigers without weeping openly i will probably start making a point of going there on a regular basis. oh, tigers.
*with the notable exception of the late krakatoa, a komodo dragon who has been appreciated by like 27,000 people thus far. you fascinate me, internet, but i will probably never understand you.
i spend a lot of time thinking about animal parks, which is unsurprising, given the rigors of maintaining ye olde birthday cakes for animals tumblr (it is no picnic: the panda photos really start to bleed together after the third or fourth month, and the internet still seems to lack interest in fêting reptiles*). ethics of anthropomorphism aside, we have a complicated history: when i was growing up in southern california, local heavies included a drive-through safari at which an african elephant broke free, killed one of her trainers, and forced the closure of two freeways; the san diego zoo (linked in the early '90s to hunting farms); and sea world (enough said). irresponsible animal parks are nightmarish, but conscientious ones are invaluable to conservationists. the bronx zoo is the flagship urban animal park of the wildlife conservation society, a nonprofit which receives excellent ratings from groups like charity navigator and kicks ass when it comes to, say, taking care of little snow leopards. we made a point of visiting the zoo this weekend because they've just started letting the public have a look at this five-month-old fellow, asleep with his mum five feet away from us in my photo; he's the firstborn son of leo, a leopard cub who was orphaned in the mountains of pakistan back in 2005 and rescued and hand-fed by a shepherd (seriously). thank you, bronx zoo, for being the sort of animal park that spearheads worldwide leopard-saving efforts and not the sort of animal park that plunks its big-cat exhibits right next to a shrieking merry-go-round (i'm looking at you, national zoo). the zoo's extensive grounds seemed to suit all of the animals we visited, actually, and once i have figured out how to hang out with tigers without weeping openly i will probably start making a point of going there on a regular basis. oh, tigers.
*with the notable exception of the late krakatoa, a komodo dragon who has been appreciated by like 27,000 people thus far. you fascinate me, internet, but i will probably never understand you.
08.09.13
CONSUMED: A PARTIAL LIST.
babayaga (book). toby barlow's book-length werewolf poem introduced me to a new breed of supernatural fiction, and i was thrilled when his follow-up novel materialized here at my office. scrappy eastern-european witches and noirish spy types in postwar paris, you guys! smoking owl pellets, turning policemen into fleas, and, er, developing ad campaigns (i'm probably ready for TB's other career in marketing to stop informing his novels)! this one (in prose, except for the witches' songs) is also wildly inventive—the subplot about the policemen who become fleas is particularly lovely, and the magic is fascinating and brutal—but it is also seriously patchy. the central love story falls kind of flat, and the main character, he of the ad campaigns, is so undercharacterized that i had a hard time caring about what happened to him. while i still think barlow's work is umpteen times more interesting that your average summer murder-in-paradise pop fiction, i also think he needs to crank up the lyrical spookiness with his next project; it's still the most exciting thing about his work.
the bling ring (film). sofia coppola's latest, based on a vanity fair true-crime piece called "the suspects wore louboutins," follows emma watson and several other sweet-and-sour young things as they burgle* their way through star-spangled los angeles. hey, there they are in paris hilton's house (seriously, coppola filmed there)! it's megan fox and brian austin green's unexpectedly-tasteful stuff! it's gavin rossdale, "acting"! i suppose one could argue that the film's anemic plot and abrupt ending double down on its characters' superficiality and junior-varsity existentialism, but let's call a spade a spade: the bling ring is exquisitely-composed television,** not a movie. i miss lost-in-translation-era sofia c.
the comedy of errors (play). shakespeare in the park is playing to the groundlings this summer: both of the public's 2013 offerings are comparatively short (90 and 100 minutes, respectively), intermission-free comedies, and the second (love's labour's lost) is a musical by the folks who brought us bloody bloody andrew jackson and peter and the starcatcher, which is probably why joe and i haven't been able to score tickets via the virtual line (for three goddamn weeks we've been trying! get out of my line, broadway types!). comedy's goofy double-mistaken-identity plot is perfect for extra-broad, scooby-doo-times-three's-company hijinks, and the cast was up for it. hamish linklater and jesse tyler ferguson are accomplished clowns, and it was satisfying to see them with a full show's worth of the sort of material shakespeare usually hands them for short riffs. 90 minutes of, like, the pyramus-and-thisbe slapstick from a midsummer night's dream is not the sort of thing i need to see every summer, but this summer it was grand. also, it began with "sigh no more" performed as a forties-era torch song! that was as satisfying as watching a nun hand out licorice (grand street, i salute you).
the dog stars (book). a world-devouring superflu has killed almost everyone on earth; now a man flies a prop plane around colorado with his trusty dog, occasionally feeding him the survivors they encounter. on paper the dog stars sounds like a touchy-feely post-apocalyptic cross between illusions and the road, and it...is, but that's not such a bad thing. peter heller is a widely-published outdoor writer, and he writes like a guy who's spent a lot of nights in a tent (i recognize this type because i spent a lot of nights in my backyard in a tent). he also writes like a guy who really loves dogs, like a guy who's taken care of a white-muzzled dog or two, and the way he describes old jasper, man-jerky-eating aside, breaks me right in half. i don't tend to recommend novels i've enjoyed to joe—raymond chandler is maybe the only writer i've gotten under his skin—but i might have a go with this one; it's an elegant alternative to those child-contestant-killing and brain-chomping ends of the world you hear so much about these days. it is also, predictably, solid in-flight reading.
great plains (book). ian frazier, dear reader, is a motherfucking delight. i think i have a crush on his curiosity: he knows just when to ignore a story's paved route and crash through the laundry lines in someone's backyard. i came out of his travels in siberia nearly as besotted with the place as he is, and this earlier account of how he cobwebbed across the US in a nasty old van in search of ghost towns and crazy horse's people makes me want to bully my stepsister into letting me drive her car to california.*** he presents watching the beautiful robinson sisters of nicodemus, kansas perform a founder's-day dance in church-lady clothes to prince's "when doves cry" as an unironic peak life experience (or platonic anamnesis, depending on where you're sitting?), and i totally buy it.
the master builder (play). i like both john turturro and ibsen, and i made the mistake of thinking i would like john turturro in ibsen (as halvard solness, the titular builder). i'm almost alright with having made this mistake, for katherine borowitz**** as his bereaved and thrown-over wife was fascinating, if not as fascinating as ibsen's other ladies. solness is supposedly tormented (the next generation is clawing at his heels! his erections, har har, are few and far between! he has an annoying and probably imaginary young friend in a petticoat!), but turturro just seemed irritated, like a guy who promised himself he'd remember to buy coffee on the way home last night and woke up to a cupboard of weird old tea. fortunately my theatregoing ladydate kinda hated the show as well, and collective indignation is a hallmark of our friendship, so the evening ended on a high note.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 have you ever gotten into trouble in mexico?
02 what would your version of "sigh no more" sound like?
03 blood meridian was unreadable for me. should i give cormac mccarthy another chance and read the road, or should i move on and read some young-adult vampire novels instead?
04 how many nights have you spent in a tent?
05 do you pass books on to significant others?
06 team joan or team ian. pick a side.
*emma watson's "i want to rob," pronounced in her best unskilled-british-mimic's-approximation-of-a-so-cal-accent, is funny but misleading: robbery is, say it with me now, the taking of property by force or threat of force.
**call it an extraterrestrially-gorgeous episode of the OC, perhaps one of the ones where marissa cooper gets into trouble in mexico.
***joan didion, she of the languid cigarette and the white stingray on a thousand pinterest boards, never brings me along on her "secular communion" with freeways. i'm turning into the sort of reader and perhaps the sort of writer who needs generosity in her nonfiction. and muchness.
****turturro's offstage spouse, as it happens.
babayaga (book). toby barlow's book-length werewolf poem introduced me to a new breed of supernatural fiction, and i was thrilled when his follow-up novel materialized here at my office. scrappy eastern-european witches and noirish spy types in postwar paris, you guys! smoking owl pellets, turning policemen into fleas, and, er, developing ad campaigns (i'm probably ready for TB's other career in marketing to stop informing his novels)! this one (in prose, except for the witches' songs) is also wildly inventive—the subplot about the policemen who become fleas is particularly lovely, and the magic is fascinating and brutal—but it is also seriously patchy. the central love story falls kind of flat, and the main character, he of the ad campaigns, is so undercharacterized that i had a hard time caring about what happened to him. while i still think barlow's work is umpteen times more interesting that your average summer murder-in-paradise pop fiction, i also think he needs to crank up the lyrical spookiness with his next project; it's still the most exciting thing about his work.
the bling ring (film). sofia coppola's latest, based on a vanity fair true-crime piece called "the suspects wore louboutins," follows emma watson and several other sweet-and-sour young things as they burgle* their way through star-spangled los angeles. hey, there they are in paris hilton's house (seriously, coppola filmed there)! it's megan fox and brian austin green's unexpectedly-tasteful stuff! it's gavin rossdale, "acting"! i suppose one could argue that the film's anemic plot and abrupt ending double down on its characters' superficiality and junior-varsity existentialism, but let's call a spade a spade: the bling ring is exquisitely-composed television,** not a movie. i miss lost-in-translation-era sofia c.
the comedy of errors (play). shakespeare in the park is playing to the groundlings this summer: both of the public's 2013 offerings are comparatively short (90 and 100 minutes, respectively), intermission-free comedies, and the second (love's labour's lost) is a musical by the folks who brought us bloody bloody andrew jackson and peter and the starcatcher, which is probably why joe and i haven't been able to score tickets via the virtual line (for three goddamn weeks we've been trying! get out of my line, broadway types!). comedy's goofy double-mistaken-identity plot is perfect for extra-broad, scooby-doo-times-three's-company hijinks, and the cast was up for it. hamish linklater and jesse tyler ferguson are accomplished clowns, and it was satisfying to see them with a full show's worth of the sort of material shakespeare usually hands them for short riffs. 90 minutes of, like, the pyramus-and-thisbe slapstick from a midsummer night's dream is not the sort of thing i need to see every summer, but this summer it was grand. also, it began with "sigh no more" performed as a forties-era torch song! that was as satisfying as watching a nun hand out licorice (grand street, i salute you).
the dog stars (book). a world-devouring superflu has killed almost everyone on earth; now a man flies a prop plane around colorado with his trusty dog, occasionally feeding him the survivors they encounter. on paper the dog stars sounds like a touchy-feely post-apocalyptic cross between illusions and the road, and it...is, but that's not such a bad thing. peter heller is a widely-published outdoor writer, and he writes like a guy who's spent a lot of nights in a tent (i recognize this type because i spent a lot of nights in my backyard in a tent). he also writes like a guy who really loves dogs, like a guy who's taken care of a white-muzzled dog or two, and the way he describes old jasper, man-jerky-eating aside, breaks me right in half. i don't tend to recommend novels i've enjoyed to joe—raymond chandler is maybe the only writer i've gotten under his skin—but i might have a go with this one; it's an elegant alternative to those child-contestant-killing and brain-chomping ends of the world you hear so much about these days. it is also, predictably, solid in-flight reading.
great plains (book). ian frazier, dear reader, is a motherfucking delight. i think i have a crush on his curiosity: he knows just when to ignore a story's paved route and crash through the laundry lines in someone's backyard. i came out of his travels in siberia nearly as besotted with the place as he is, and this earlier account of how he cobwebbed across the US in a nasty old van in search of ghost towns and crazy horse's people makes me want to bully my stepsister into letting me drive her car to california.*** he presents watching the beautiful robinson sisters of nicodemus, kansas perform a founder's-day dance in church-lady clothes to prince's "when doves cry" as an unironic peak life experience (or platonic anamnesis, depending on where you're sitting?), and i totally buy it.
the master builder (play). i like both john turturro and ibsen, and i made the mistake of thinking i would like john turturro in ibsen (as halvard solness, the titular builder). i'm almost alright with having made this mistake, for katherine borowitz**** as his bereaved and thrown-over wife was fascinating, if not as fascinating as ibsen's other ladies. solness is supposedly tormented (the next generation is clawing at his heels! his erections, har har, are few and far between! he has an annoying and probably imaginary young friend in a petticoat!), but turturro just seemed irritated, like a guy who promised himself he'd remember to buy coffee on the way home last night and woke up to a cupboard of weird old tea. fortunately my theatregoing ladydate kinda hated the show as well, and collective indignation is a hallmark of our friendship, so the evening ended on a high note.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 have you ever gotten into trouble in mexico?
02 what would your version of "sigh no more" sound like?
03 blood meridian was unreadable for me. should i give cormac mccarthy another chance and read the road, or should i move on and read some young-adult vampire novels instead?
04 how many nights have you spent in a tent?
05 do you pass books on to significant others?
06 team joan or team ian. pick a side.
*emma watson's "i want to rob," pronounced in her best unskilled-british-mimic's-approximation-of-a-so-cal-accent, is funny but misleading: robbery is, say it with me now, the taking of property by force or threat of force.
**call it an extraterrestrially-gorgeous episode of the OC, perhaps one of the ones where marissa cooper gets into trouble in mexico.
***joan didion, she of the languid cigarette and the white stingray on a thousand pinterest boards, never brings me along on her "secular communion" with freeways. i'm turning into the sort of reader and perhaps the sort of writer who needs generosity in her nonfiction. and muchness.
****turturro's offstage spouse, as it happens.
06.18.13
CONSUMED: A PARTIAL LIST.
amsterdam (book). my plan to bathe in the healing light of ian mcewan's booker-prize-winning novel after a comparatively underwhelming experience with atonement, she was not so successful. amsterdam isn't a bad book—it's funny, it anticipates in a slumping english newspaper the sort of editorial panic those of us in magazines enjoy these days, and it makes the lake district sound mildly interesting—but it is also quite short, and its morality-tale ending feels abrupt. part of the pleasure of a book like atonement is the painterly buildup to a character's shocking decision; amsterdam in its entirety feels as long as the tallis family's fateful dinner party, and its payoff doesn't justify the broad strokes mcewan has to use to get his characters in place in the time he allows himself. i'll give you one more chance, mcewan, and if you don't behave, i'll turn you into a goon.
an equal music (book). vikram seth's the golden gate (pushkin sonnets about san francisco) is my second favorite novel-in-poetry,* and it's had me promising myself for years that i'd read his prose as well. an equal music feels quite a bit like poetry; it's about chamber musicians, love, and sexy old europe [london, vienna, and venice], and its central romance is studded with substantial chunks of unabashedly florid prose. normally that would bug me, but seth's sincerity feels sweet rather than creepy most of the time.** music at its best feels like a really, really long alex ross column, and who can object to that?
frankenstein's army (film). the missus and i make a point of seeing the most ridiculous-sounding horror movie at the tribeca film festival every year, and this one—a found-footage stinker in which a platoon of russian soldiers attempt to win world war two by enlisting dr. frankenstein and are instead torn apart by a gaggle of what look like the anthropomorphic bomb-goblins from labyrinth—was that. it feels a bit unsporting to call it nonsensical, but i do expect my horror to be internally consistent, and frankenstein's sloppy video-game angles and haphazard plotting make the leprechaun franchise look like tolstoy.
fresh meat (film). "there are so many amazing movies at the festival this year," said director danny mulheron,*** "and then there's this movie." mulheron's horror-slapstick (about a family of cannibals "who happen to be maori" held hostage by violent fugitives in suburban new zealand) felt like low-budget kiwi robert rodriguez circa four rooms, and i kind of loved it: fresh meat was the last thing i saw at tribeca this year, and after two weeks of dancing for Extremely Serious Filmmakers, i was delighted to meet one who ripped all of the reserved seating markers out of his theater so that everyone could sit where they liked. a cannibalism-comedy double feature with fresh meat and eddie the sleepwalking cannibal would not be a bad way to spend an evening, is what i'm saying.
julius caesar (play). joe and i nearly took a weird train out of london to see the RSC's julius caesar on our trip to england last fall, and i'm a bit sorry we didn't, both because impromptu shakespeare binges are awesome and because when it crossed the atlantic it landed at the BAM harvey theater, a problematic little venue full of loutish cell-phone answerers which makes me think without fondness of when i was limber enough to fold myself up like a hipster's bike. theater aside, the theatre was quite good: the production is set in present-day africa,**** and caesar & co. bring to mind any number of nasty modern dictators. "nasty" is the key word here; i don't find any of shakespeare's tragic heroes especially cuddly, but julie has always been down at the bottom of the list, and he's still there now. the minimal concrete set felt postapocalyptic rather than military—lots of postapocalyptic shakespeare around these days—and the witchy-tribal soothsayer made the players' very modern punishments feel ages old. i like this new timelessness.
pym (book). did i find pym, mat johnson's tale of an unemployed professor who leads a team to antarctica in search of the cold-ass honky described at the end of edgar allan poe's narrative of arthur gordon pym of nantucket, or did pym find me? i first set out for it after storming out of a washington hotel room in a fit of hanger (i found neither it nor food, but i did acquire a lovely edition of 1Q84). when i finally did get my own copy, i found, among other things, a surprisingly awesome story-within-the-story of a thomas-kinkade-like conservative (orange county is composed almost entirely of pastel stucco and republicans; we have strong feelings about thomas kinkade, and conservatives). i've also found mat johnson to be one of the few writers i can follow on twitter without wanting to pull out my own teeth. bring pym to the beach this summer! lily concurs.
the reluctant fundamentalist (film). first a 2007 novel by pakistani author mohsin hamid, the reluctant fundamentalist was, by the time we met, a Very Serious Post-9/11 Thriller featuring, among other things, british/pakistani dreamboat riz ahmed, kate hudson as a recent college graduate with terrible brown hair, and kiefer sutherland as a wall street master-of-the-universe type (kicking down terrorists' doors has been very, very good to him; i didn't recognize him when i saw him at the premiere). it's thoughtful and intense—both ahmed's character's response to the ongoing way he's stereotyped and his movie-spanning chat with liev schrieber are put together quite pleasingly—but i imagine one's enjoyment of it and, more to the point, one's appreciation of its twisty conclusion would be rather compromised if, say, one had to tiptoe out of the theater ten minutes before it ended in order to collect audience award ballots. ah, the heartbreak of film festivals.
stranger things happen (book). kelly link's first collection didn't kick me in the teeth nearly as hard as her second one did, but it's still some of the cleverest, scariest, most original fiction i've read in years. come for the prospective father-in-law with interchangeable handmade noses ("water off a black dog's back"), stay for the stuff in "the specialist's hat" that i'll reference without actually talking about because it makes me nervous. salon's laura miller called stranger things happen "an alchemical mix of borges, raymond chandler and 'buffy the vampire slayer;'" that's about right.
V/H/S/2 (film). like frankenstein's army, V/H/S/2 is found-footage horror (here, an anthology of four short films united by the premise of a couple of investigators breaking into a house to find a missing man and finding videocassettes full of mayhem*****); unlike frankenstein's army, it was occasionally so scary it was actually exhausting (in shorts which don't have time to develop fancy plot points, you're mostly dealing with jump-shock after jump-shock; also, i saw it by myself at midnight on a friday). "a ride in the park," by the blair witch project's co-director, is themost only enjoyable helmet-cam video i've ever seen; "slumber party alien abduction" features the fictional suffering and demise of the director's own dog, but said dog was rewarded with innumerable hot dogs at the shoot, we learned in the Q&A after the movie, so i'm alright. this love we have is real, late-night tribeca.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 the leprechaun franchise, she is rebooting this year. shall you watch?
02 do any of shakespeare's tragic heroes tug at your heartstrings?
03 do you get hangry?
04 how hard would it be to talk you into going to antarctica?
05 the shit: when was it last scared out of you?
06 what is the premise of your found-footage horror film?
*toby barlow's crazy, lurid sharp teeth - free verse about werewolves in los angeles - is my first.
**the love story does occasionally stray into bridge across forever territory, but the two decades i've put between myself and richard bach have made echoes of him in other books slightly more manageable.
***(once a nominee for best female performance for his work as heidi the hippo in meet the feebles)
****the RSC's artistic director was inspired by nelson mandela's notes on julius caesar in the robben island bible, a copy of the complete works of shakespeare smuggled between south african political prisoners. each man underlined passage which was meaningful to him, and mandela chose "cowards die many deaths..." from julius caesar, act II, scene II.
*****generic mayhem, not blackstone's mayhem or dean winters as mayhem****** in those allstate commercials.
******a fellow volunteer claimed to see dean winters at the same premiere at which i encountered kiefer "babyman" sutherland. she was beside herself.
amsterdam (book). my plan to bathe in the healing light of ian mcewan's booker-prize-winning novel after a comparatively underwhelming experience with atonement, she was not so successful. amsterdam isn't a bad book—it's funny, it anticipates in a slumping english newspaper the sort of editorial panic those of us in magazines enjoy these days, and it makes the lake district sound mildly interesting—but it is also quite short, and its morality-tale ending feels abrupt. part of the pleasure of a book like atonement is the painterly buildup to a character's shocking decision; amsterdam in its entirety feels as long as the tallis family's fateful dinner party, and its payoff doesn't justify the broad strokes mcewan has to use to get his characters in place in the time he allows himself. i'll give you one more chance, mcewan, and if you don't behave, i'll turn you into a goon.
an equal music (book). vikram seth's the golden gate (pushkin sonnets about san francisco) is my second favorite novel-in-poetry,* and it's had me promising myself for years that i'd read his prose as well. an equal music feels quite a bit like poetry; it's about chamber musicians, love, and sexy old europe [london, vienna, and venice], and its central romance is studded with substantial chunks of unabashedly florid prose. normally that would bug me, but seth's sincerity feels sweet rather than creepy most of the time.** music at its best feels like a really, really long alex ross column, and who can object to that?
frankenstein's army (film). the missus and i make a point of seeing the most ridiculous-sounding horror movie at the tribeca film festival every year, and this one—a found-footage stinker in which a platoon of russian soldiers attempt to win world war two by enlisting dr. frankenstein and are instead torn apart by a gaggle of what look like the anthropomorphic bomb-goblins from labyrinth—was that. it feels a bit unsporting to call it nonsensical, but i do expect my horror to be internally consistent, and frankenstein's sloppy video-game angles and haphazard plotting make the leprechaun franchise look like tolstoy.
fresh meat (film). "there are so many amazing movies at the festival this year," said director danny mulheron,*** "and then there's this movie." mulheron's horror-slapstick (about a family of cannibals "who happen to be maori" held hostage by violent fugitives in suburban new zealand) felt like low-budget kiwi robert rodriguez circa four rooms, and i kind of loved it: fresh meat was the last thing i saw at tribeca this year, and after two weeks of dancing for Extremely Serious Filmmakers, i was delighted to meet one who ripped all of the reserved seating markers out of his theater so that everyone could sit where they liked. a cannibalism-comedy double feature with fresh meat and eddie the sleepwalking cannibal would not be a bad way to spend an evening, is what i'm saying.
julius caesar (play). joe and i nearly took a weird train out of london to see the RSC's julius caesar on our trip to england last fall, and i'm a bit sorry we didn't, both because impromptu shakespeare binges are awesome and because when it crossed the atlantic it landed at the BAM harvey theater, a problematic little venue full of loutish cell-phone answerers which makes me think without fondness of when i was limber enough to fold myself up like a hipster's bike. theater aside, the theatre was quite good: the production is set in present-day africa,**** and caesar & co. bring to mind any number of nasty modern dictators. "nasty" is the key word here; i don't find any of shakespeare's tragic heroes especially cuddly, but julie has always been down at the bottom of the list, and he's still there now. the minimal concrete set felt postapocalyptic rather than military—lots of postapocalyptic shakespeare around these days—and the witchy-tribal soothsayer made the players' very modern punishments feel ages old. i like this new timelessness.
pym (book). did i find pym, mat johnson's tale of an unemployed professor who leads a team to antarctica in search of the cold-ass honky described at the end of edgar allan poe's narrative of arthur gordon pym of nantucket, or did pym find me? i first set out for it after storming out of a washington hotel room in a fit of hanger (i found neither it nor food, but i did acquire a lovely edition of 1Q84). when i finally did get my own copy, i found, among other things, a surprisingly awesome story-within-the-story of a thomas-kinkade-like conservative (orange county is composed almost entirely of pastel stucco and republicans; we have strong feelings about thomas kinkade, and conservatives). i've also found mat johnson to be one of the few writers i can follow on twitter without wanting to pull out my own teeth. bring pym to the beach this summer! lily concurs.
the reluctant fundamentalist (film). first a 2007 novel by pakistani author mohsin hamid, the reluctant fundamentalist was, by the time we met, a Very Serious Post-9/11 Thriller featuring, among other things, british/pakistani dreamboat riz ahmed, kate hudson as a recent college graduate with terrible brown hair, and kiefer sutherland as a wall street master-of-the-universe type (kicking down terrorists' doors has been very, very good to him; i didn't recognize him when i saw him at the premiere). it's thoughtful and intense—both ahmed's character's response to the ongoing way he's stereotyped and his movie-spanning chat with liev schrieber are put together quite pleasingly—but i imagine one's enjoyment of it and, more to the point, one's appreciation of its twisty conclusion would be rather compromised if, say, one had to tiptoe out of the theater ten minutes before it ended in order to collect audience award ballots. ah, the heartbreak of film festivals.
stranger things happen (book). kelly link's first collection didn't kick me in the teeth nearly as hard as her second one did, but it's still some of the cleverest, scariest, most original fiction i've read in years. come for the prospective father-in-law with interchangeable handmade noses ("water off a black dog's back"), stay for the stuff in "the specialist's hat" that i'll reference without actually talking about because it makes me nervous. salon's laura miller called stranger things happen "an alchemical mix of borges, raymond chandler and 'buffy the vampire slayer;'" that's about right.
V/H/S/2 (film). like frankenstein's army, V/H/S/2 is found-footage horror (here, an anthology of four short films united by the premise of a couple of investigators breaking into a house to find a missing man and finding videocassettes full of mayhem*****); unlike frankenstein's army, it was occasionally so scary it was actually exhausting (in shorts which don't have time to develop fancy plot points, you're mostly dealing with jump-shock after jump-shock; also, i saw it by myself at midnight on a friday). "a ride in the park," by the blair witch project's co-director, is the
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 the leprechaun franchise, she is rebooting this year. shall you watch?
02 do any of shakespeare's tragic heroes tug at your heartstrings?
03 do you get hangry?
04 how hard would it be to talk you into going to antarctica?
05 the shit: when was it last scared out of you?
06 what is the premise of your found-footage horror film?
*toby barlow's crazy, lurid sharp teeth - free verse about werewolves in los angeles - is my first.
**the love story does occasionally stray into bridge across forever territory, but the two decades i've put between myself and richard bach have made echoes of him in other books slightly more manageable.
***(once a nominee for best female performance for his work as heidi the hippo in meet the feebles)
****the RSC's artistic director was inspired by nelson mandela's notes on julius caesar in the robben island bible, a copy of the complete works of shakespeare smuggled between south african political prisoners. each man underlined passage which was meaningful to him, and mandela chose "cowards die many deaths..." from julius caesar, act II, scene II.
*****generic mayhem, not blackstone's mayhem or dean winters as mayhem****** in those allstate commercials.
******a fellow volunteer claimed to see dean winters at the same premiere at which i encountered kiefer "babyman" sutherland. she was beside herself.
05.27.13
101 in 1001 {III}: 036 enter a cooking or baking contest [completed 05.18.13]
while competing in a cooking or baking contest isn't especially difficult, finding a suitable one to enter is kind of rough. how does that even work outside of, like, county fairs and food television? i felt like the universe was tugging on my shirtsleeve when i got an email about a neighborhood cupcake-off in williamsburg last weekend: it seemed comparatively mellow, last-minute entrants were fine, and proceeds went to charity. also, let's be honest, my dark and stormy cupcakes are the shit. my friend lesley had at least two at her bachelorette party and i think she's paleo.
so: cupcaking. the event was held in a notorious den of foodies* and i figured i didn't have much of a shot at straight-up winning; presentation, on the other hand, i could do. i thought broken umbrellas were a win, but the little paper cocktail versions i had were awfully tropical and, when artfully mangled, said "hurricane" rather more loudly than "the shitty umbrellas you buy from some guy on the subway when you're caught in a storm on the way to the office and end up busting and throwing away two weeks later." luckily my sister (hooray sister!) noted that the shiny wrappers i'd found in the cupcake section at sur la table** made the cupcakes themselves look like little garbage cans. with that i felt we were in the clear.
see how not-all-that-wobbly my penmanship is? one would never guess that the gal at the ticket counter encouraging me to get friendly with the crowd and talk up my goods had just caused my hands to shake so badly i had to delegate cupcake-quartering*** to my sister! i was fine five minutes later, it's - i like to feed people, but i'm deeply shy, and more of a lobsterman than a hostess. i thought i would just set up my stuff, motor off, and then come back later to haul up the traps. this crowd had petitions, and bow ties, and one lady was wearing a baby, and i don't want to look at people while they're eating or to have them look at me, and i was wearing a sort-of see-through shirt (they are a theme this spring, apparently). i spent most of the cupcake caucus skulking around in the store outside the event, is what i'm saying, and i am okay with that.
as hinted in my last post, i contemplated voting for myself for the people's choice award. i did in fact like my cupcake best, but i felt it would be unsporting to put a ticket in my own mason jar (yes, one votes for one's favorite cupcake in a mason jar; shut up, esb). sadly, my actual vote was even more ungentlemanly: i was going to go for an entrant who had pleased me by using salt, but she had an early lead and i still kind of wanted to win, so i went third-party. cupcaking pipes integrity from you like so much buttercream frosting.
the presentation award went to a gal who arranged little spikes of bacon on top of her cupcakes like the skeksi palace in the dark crystal (quite cool). innovation went to a baker of tamarind cupcakes who fell ill and left before the winners were announced(!), the judges gave top honors to an elvis cupcake (bacon/peanut butter/banana, i assume; i skipped the baconful entries), and the early leader (a professional cupcaker!) won people's choice. there was a respectable handful of tickets in my jar at the end of the night; though i won't enjoy free berries for the summer,**** i feel like the cakes were appreciated. when asked to introduce myself and my baking to the crowd, i said in a steady voice that i like bad weather.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 have you ever entered a cooking or baking contest? what happened?
02 have you ever voted for a third-party candidate?
03 speaking of baking, i now have a tumblr featuring birthday cakes for animals. how about that?
04 are you a cupcake enthusiast?
*i've been trying to register for one of their weekend knife-skills classes for at least four thousand years and five deep flesh wounds; jumping on that calendar is harder than getting reservations at pdt.
**holy shit, cupcake section at sur la table.
***even after the quartering, anyone who tried all of the entries would have ended up eating the equivalent of at least...four whole cupcakes? the judges looked a little shaky by the time we wrapped up.
****heading out to brooklyn each week for a CSA share would have been a pain in the ass, but damn, that was a good prize.
while competing in a cooking or baking contest isn't especially difficult, finding a suitable one to enter is kind of rough. how does that even work outside of, like, county fairs and food television? i felt like the universe was tugging on my shirtsleeve when i got an email about a neighborhood cupcake-off in williamsburg last weekend: it seemed comparatively mellow, last-minute entrants were fine, and proceeds went to charity. also, let's be honest, my dark and stormy cupcakes are the shit. my friend lesley had at least two at her bachelorette party and i think she's paleo.
so: cupcaking. the event was held in a notorious den of foodies* and i figured i didn't have much of a shot at straight-up winning; presentation, on the other hand, i could do. i thought broken umbrellas were a win, but the little paper cocktail versions i had were awfully tropical and, when artfully mangled, said "hurricane" rather more loudly than "the shitty umbrellas you buy from some guy on the subway when you're caught in a storm on the way to the office and end up busting and throwing away two weeks later." luckily my sister (hooray sister!) noted that the shiny wrappers i'd found in the cupcake section at sur la table** made the cupcakes themselves look like little garbage cans. with that i felt we were in the clear.
see how not-all-that-wobbly my penmanship is? one would never guess that the gal at the ticket counter encouraging me to get friendly with the crowd and talk up my goods had just caused my hands to shake so badly i had to delegate cupcake-quartering*** to my sister! i was fine five minutes later, it's - i like to feed people, but i'm deeply shy, and more of a lobsterman than a hostess. i thought i would just set up my stuff, motor off, and then come back later to haul up the traps. this crowd had petitions, and bow ties, and one lady was wearing a baby, and i don't want to look at people while they're eating or to have them look at me, and i was wearing a sort-of see-through shirt (they are a theme this spring, apparently). i spent most of the cupcake caucus skulking around in the store outside the event, is what i'm saying, and i am okay with that.
as hinted in my last post, i contemplated voting for myself for the people's choice award. i did in fact like my cupcake best, but i felt it would be unsporting to put a ticket in my own mason jar (yes, one votes for one's favorite cupcake in a mason jar; shut up, esb). sadly, my actual vote was even more ungentlemanly: i was going to go for an entrant who had pleased me by using salt, but she had an early lead and i still kind of wanted to win, so i went third-party. cupcaking pipes integrity from you like so much buttercream frosting.
the presentation award went to a gal who arranged little spikes of bacon on top of her cupcakes like the skeksi palace in the dark crystal (quite cool). innovation went to a baker of tamarind cupcakes who fell ill and left before the winners were announced(!), the judges gave top honors to an elvis cupcake (bacon/peanut butter/banana, i assume; i skipped the baconful entries), and the early leader (a professional cupcaker!) won people's choice. there was a respectable handful of tickets in my jar at the end of the night; though i won't enjoy free berries for the summer,**** i feel like the cakes were appreciated. when asked to introduce myself and my baking to the crowd, i said in a steady voice that i like bad weather.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 have you ever entered a cooking or baking contest? what happened?
02 have you ever voted for a third-party candidate?
03 speaking of baking, i now have a tumblr featuring birthday cakes for animals. how about that?
04 are you a cupcake enthusiast?
*i've been trying to register for one of their weekend knife-skills classes for at least four thousand years and five deep flesh wounds; jumping on that calendar is harder than getting reservations at pdt.
**holy shit, cupcake section at sur la table.
***even after the quartering, anyone who tried all of the entries would have ended up eating the equivalent of at least...four whole cupcakes? the judges looked a little shaky by the time we wrapped up.
****heading out to brooklyn each week for a CSA share would have been a pain in the ass, but damn, that was a good prize.
04.29.13
101 in 1001 {III}: 005 refinance the apartment [completed 04.15.13]
it's unfortunate that my not-entirely-unjustified fear of the co-op board caused me to delete all of the posts i wrote about how joe and i found and bought our apartment a few years ago; the ins and outs of that process (ten letters of recommendation! home visits from inspectors in two states! my father forced to sign an affidavit saying he would never have a dog!*) were much more interesting than this winter and spring's** clerical shenanigans in pursuit of a new and improved loan. that said, this dance of the seven tax forms has made me feel much more adult than becoming a homeowner did; like booking and keeping your own dental appointments, refinancing for a better interest rate is the quotidian TCB of a grown-ass woman. my teeth are clean.
*because new york city real estate nonlogic makes you crazy, joe and i thought at one point that we would be more attractive to the board if we included my dad as a non-resident co-applicant. actually it made no positive difference, and we have been tied together like freakish six-legged-race contestants ever since.
**it took four months, all told. just looking at a bank statement or a fax machine now makes me feel itchy.
it's unfortunate that my not-entirely-unjustified fear of the co-op board caused me to delete all of the posts i wrote about how joe and i found and bought our apartment a few years ago; the ins and outs of that process (ten letters of recommendation! home visits from inspectors in two states! my father forced to sign an affidavit saying he would never have a dog!*) were much more interesting than this winter and spring's** clerical shenanigans in pursuit of a new and improved loan. that said, this dance of the seven tax forms has made me feel much more adult than becoming a homeowner did; like booking and keeping your own dental appointments, refinancing for a better interest rate is the quotidian TCB of a grown-ass woman. my teeth are clean.
*because new york city real estate nonlogic makes you crazy, joe and i thought at one point that we would be more attractive to the board if we included my dad as a non-resident co-applicant. actually it made no positive difference, and we have been tied together like freakish six-legged-race contestants ever since.
**it took four months, all told. just looking at a bank statement or a fax machine now makes me feel itchy.
04.15.13
CONSUMED AT THE END OF FEBRUARY AND BEGINNING OF MARCH: A PARTIAL LIST.
atonement (book). i didn't love atonement nearly as much as paul did when he mentioned it here 11(!) years ago - cecilia's green dress is my favorite part of both the book and the film, it seems - but i do think ian mcewan nailed little briony tallis's sinister preadolescent mind and/or something sinister and preadolescent about a certain kind of writer (was i that awful when i was a tween writer? i like to think i was interested in making things rather than controlling things, but i also like to think that keeping a domino in my purse protects me when i travel). i brought a copy of amsterdam (winner of the '98 booker prize) home a week ago; if it wows me, i reserve the right to gush about mcewan as hungover twentysomething paul did.
beasts of the southern wild (film). little quvenzhané wallis earned her best actress academy award nomination; like katniss in the hunger games, hushpuppy (a girl who lives with her father in a postapocalyptic louisiana bayou) is hermetically sealed and must have been hell to play. happily, she's given the voiceovers katniss needed so badly to explain herself and her situation; unhappily, those voiceovers and the awkward beasts that (should have been a straight metaphor but actually, awkwardly) turn up at the end of the movie are its only sources of momentum. beasts is a beautiful film, but it stagnated in ways that didn't always feel deliberate. joe fell asleep for an hour of it, and when he woke up i...didn't really have to get him up to speed.
dead man down (film). joe and i needed a reason to go to nitehawk cinema in williamsburg on a friday afternoon a few weeks ago, and a new noomi rapace thriller directed by niels arden oplev (he of the original, swedish girl with the dragon tattoo films) worked for us. to our surprise, it also turned out to be the mysterious generic colin farrell thriller that filmed down the street from us last summer, so noomi and colin conduct their convoluted revenge plots and romances (plural, there, in both cases) in our local basketball courts, kosher delis, luncheonettes, and so on. (they do not go to doughnut plant, not even once, so realism this ain't.) it's really, really terrible, so unless you too live in co-op village or have a thing for fireflies in graveyards (there is one extremely cool scene of that sort, shot out near joe's office in queens, weirdly enough), it's probably safe to keep walking.
dersu uzala (film). ian frazier's goddamn fantastic travels in siberia, a nonfictional tale of flamingos and forcible watermelon donations and weddings in the middle of the road (and the book that would've killed the long ships and emerged the champion of THUNDERTOME II, if i'd either finished it before the end of the year or managed to keep up on THUNDERTOME at all), led me to dersu uzala, the first movie kurosawa made after his 1971 suicide attempt. it's a very un-kurosawa kurosawa film, or perhaps his most characteristic film of all: in slow, dreamlike takes, it follows the russian explorer vladimir arseneyev and his yoda-like nanai guide, dersu uzala, as they chart the forests and tundra of eastern russia. it's a buddy movie with almost no dialogue, and it's possible dersu's longest conversation is with a tiger; that said, the relationship between the two men develops solidly enough that the scenes at arseneyev's home back in khabarovsk, when it's clear that dersu can't leave the hills to retire with his friend in the city, are genuinely wrenching. (truth be told, i usually have little patience for kurosawa - but this i liked.) come for the tigers; stay for the tigers, and stay some more for intercultural bromance.
the diviners (book). the television in front of my treadmill at our building's Old Folks' Gym was tuned to urban tarzan a few weeks ago. the episode began with an alligator amok in someone's backyard, then barreled into the tale of a bull that had escaped into a corn maze in encino. what more, i wondered as i zombie-ran the last of my daily miles, could urban tarzan (john brennan, a freelance wild-animal wrangler) possibly face? then he was called to tackle a chimpanzee in overalls who'd downed a few bottles of codeine ("it calms him down," his human 'mother' explained) and was menacing his caretakers with a gun. the diviners is kind of like the harrowing tale of buckaroo the gun-toting sizzurp-addled chimp: set in new york city in the roaring twenties, it's the story of a psychic flapper who has to prevent a demonic doomsday-cult-leadin' ghost-man called naughty john from initiating armageddon with a series of se7en-ish ritualistic murders. she does so with a team of period-appropriate x-men (including a mysteriously violent ziegfeld girl, an immigrant pickpocket who can go unseen, a dapper healer from harlem, and an old-timey cyborg) and catchphrases ("the cat's pajamas," "pos-i-tutely," "the bee's knees," "done-ski"). i wanted to hate the diviners, but just when i thought i'd had too much, the muchness itself became almost sublime. also naughty john was quite scary! i will read the sequel, and the sequel's sequel.
the flick (play). "i'm just trying to accurately portray the people who live in the movie theater inside my head," playwright annie baker says, "and i guess there's a lot of moments of not-talking in that movie theater inside my head." the flick is literally a (single-screen) theater (in western massachusetts); the fourth wall between baker's audience and her characters is the movie screen itself, and the flick takes place mostly in the spaces between films, when popcorn needs sweeping, reels need changing, seats need de-gumming. the silence in those spaces is so substantial that the play became a little notorious for driving people out at intermission, and playwrights horizons's* artistic director actually wrote his subscribers an email defending it. no need from where i was sitting: the play was long, sure, and a bit of a letdown after the impossibly tantalizing piece on baker in the new yorker a few months ago, but it was sweet, and sad, and it reminded me of the marvelous peoplewatching i got to do as a film festival volunteer last year. annie baker...curates...people? "i so much prefer confusion and mystery in both writing and theater-going," she says, but i don't think that's so. her stuff resists reduction, is how i would put it, and i think that's a fine thing.
*playwrights horizons, incidentally, is my new favorite (non-shakespeare-adjacent) theater. joe and i saw the whale there a few months ago (here's to you, MDF) and are settling in for a long-term relationship (are we those new yorkers now?).
01.22.13
so it seems i could use a pair of glasses. it's not the sort of dire need with which i deserve to need glasses after years of wearing empty frames recreationally - o college - but it is the sort of need i probably should have addressed before attempting to see all of 2013's best picture/director/actor/actress academy award nominees (i am nearsighted in my left eye, apparently, and while i don't need glasses to drive, my optometrist noted that i might consider them if i was, you know, super-into film or theatre). i'll be getting a big old black pair from moscot's, for 1) they have been selling specs in our neighborhood for a century and 2) my four-eyed idol is marcello mastroianni in 8 1/2. joe says tortoiseshell frames would look better, and i say compromising one's vision for piddly aesthetic reasons is unforgivable. there will be time to sort these things out, for saving up for a pair of prescription moscot glasses is going to take four thousand years.
i'll be on a train somewhere between new york and washington dc as the oscars are actually distributed next month, - o vacation-planning without one's datebook at hand - but i'm taking this nominee-watching business very seriously this year; i've got just four more to go, in fact. joaquin phoenix, i'll see you in hell.
CONSUMED AT THE BEGINNING OF 2013: A PARTIAL LIST.
amour (film). i saw amour at film forum, a west village indie house known for its banana bread (beloved of derrida, apparently) and its horrible older patrons (after abandoning the 3:30 showing because the only seats left were in the front row, several couples emerged from the 4:00 theater to abuse the manager for heating it too slowly ["it has been freezing in there for several minutes!"]). i went from quietly despising them before the lights went down to squirming on their behalf once the film began, for it's their nightmare: this is the feel-bad movie of the year, a devastating story of infirmity's thefts (in a nutshell, emmanuelle riva and jean-louis trintignant are an octogenarian invalid and her husband/caregiver, respectively). if you're already aware of how it ends or don't mind spoilers, read through richard brody's negative review and how readers have responded to it; amour, as it were, gazes also into you.
django unchained (film). quentin tarantino... can photograph the hell out of a southern landscape (+) but botches a key scene at the end of his movie by front lighting a character who's supposed to be facing a blank wall at dusk (-). he gets away with dropping jim croce's "i got a name" into an antebellum buddy scene* (+!) and spoils the mood of a retributive bloodbath by yoinking a character out of the frame with a vaudeville hook (stylized violence could be fine, but the style should be consistent: this character dies in part because another character is torn apart by dogs, realistically, earlier in the movie). christoph waltz and leonardo dicaprio are great and really really great (+); samuel l. jackson as an old man and QT himself as an australian are distracting and really really distracting (-). can an egomaniac be afraid of his own talent? get out of your way, boss.
the impossible (film). more of a science fair project than a movie in some ways: HOW DO WEALTHY TOURISTS REACT TO A NATURAL DISASTER? a father will run around for two days without a shirt or shoes, even though they are probably offered to him. a mother will save all little boys in her path despite horrific wounds. little boys will grow up fast. the actors responsible for these reactions are all doing good work, but they're a bit stuck when it comes to developing dramatic tension. the impossible's scenes of the 2004 tsunami hitting thailand are fantastic - the CGI deserves a slew of technical awards, and the editing is top-notch - but when we realize fairly early on that every member of the family has survived (the impossible is based on a true story, and it's called the impossible - one could argue that we know this going into the movie, really), all we're left to wonder is how long it will take them to reunite and why the filmmakers spend so little time with the tsunami's domestic victims. the first question isn't especially interesting, and the second - well, that's another sort of movie.
les misérables (film). i did my darndest to give les mis a fair shot, o my brothers. i avoided reviews, i made a point of seeing it at the mighty ziegfeld, i tried to attribute my hatred for the london stage version to the fact that i saw it over spring break when i lived in oxford and was exhausted and kind of ill as i whispered silent prayers for someone, anyone, to shoot the insufferable gavroche. after all that, i think i appreciate the film even less than i appreciated the musical: the female characters are flat and feeble (helena bonham carter's madame thénardier is the only one with significant agency, and she's a grotesque), the history is maddeningly vague (does anyone leave the show knowing what the june rebellion was actually about?), the singing is all over the place (russell crowe's mush-mouthed inspector javert might actually be a somnambulist, poor hugh jackman is obliged to chant like a country vicar, and toothless anne hathaway chews so much scenery in "i dreamed a dream" that she creates an emotional vacuum at the beginning of the movie, forcing everyone else into endless, affectless refrains like singing waiters in times square). i hated les mis so much i'm actually kind of angry at poor old victor hugo, which i realize is like blaming david bowie and freddie mercury for "ice ice baby" and yet i can't stop the feelings. thank god i didn't have glasses.
silver linings playbook (film). the lovely and talented jennifer lawrence is the pork chop hollywood tied around bradley cooper's neck to get me to play with him, and i am okay with that transaction; he's a pleasant surprise in silver linings, more charismatic than i've seen him since the good old alias days. he's no jimmy stewart, mind you, but this is solid romantic comedy, and he and lawrence have fine flawed-boy-meets-flawed girl chemistry. that said, jacki weaver (as cooper's mother and robert de niro's wife) is the only character who consistently presents as more than a collection of symptoms. a cookie for her (and, okay, for the set decorator who name checked the midnight meat train via a neighborhood marquee).
*i am ready for a quentin tarantino v. wes anderson dj battle.
12.21.12
101 in 1001 {III}: 009 go whalewatching [completed 09.28.12]
though the whalewatching trip we took in iceland this september was my first, i think i can say that it was unlike what we would have experienced anywhere else. in mexico's sea of cortez, the harpoon-scarred gray whales of baja surface near boats, their babies at their sides: though we're utterly undeserving, they've forgiven the awestruck humans who come to them in peace. it's not like that in the north atlantic, not where we were. icelandic whalers ignore international regulations, and it's getting worse: in the 2010 hunt alone, 148 endangered fin whales and 60 minke whales were killed (the united states considered sanctions against iceland last year, but obama declined to invoke the pelly amendment). cognitive dissonance among icelanders outside of the whaling industry is pretty intense: while only 5% of them claim to eat whale regularly, some pollsters report that up to 75% of icelanders believe that whalers should be permitted to continue. japan imports the majority of the whalers' meat, but it's estimated that 40% of tourists in iceland eat it - which is where we came in. elding, the whalewatching company we chose, takes the "meet us don't eat us" campaign very seriously, and our golden-haired guide spent most of the trip from grindavík out to sea pleading with us on the whales' behalf. nothing abstract about that: she sounded close to tears at a few points, and there the minke whale was on the menu at dinner later that night, beside smoked puffin as part of a "taste of iceland" special. it's pronounced "minky," that whale's name. you can eat a minky whale.
that's the backstory - but the watching, now. we had planned to depart from reykjavik's old harbour, but the wind whipping into the bay wasn't interested in that; instead, we took the slowest double-decker bus in iceland (the only double-decker bus in iceland?) to a little fishing village forty minutes down the road. if the harbor at grindavík was considered placid, i shudder to think of what we left behind. i swallowed my gratis seasickness tablet like a good landlubber and have an unremarkable relationship with most vehicles, but when we left port and i went belowdecks for my industrial strength whalewatchin' onesie (the north atlantic is, unsurprisingly, colder than shit) i lost my abilities to walk in a straight line, stand upright, and speak english for a good twenty minutes or so. (extra-confusing when i rejoined joe, since the icelanders we met already thought he was a local. i think it was the beard.) that settled the issue of whether or not i would attempt creature-photography; in the absence of both fine motor skills and one of the semiautomatic, massive-barreled cameras the tourists around us were sporting (how close can you feel to a subject when there's a yard of equipment between you and your own lens, to say nothing of the distance between you and it?), i decided to document any whales we watched with, you know, my feelings.
september falls at the far reaches of whalewatching season, as most of the local baleen whale population migrates to warmer waters at summer's end, and it was clear from the way our guide was hyping dolphins that she didn't have high hopes for the afternoon. then, o then, the smallest spout at ten o'clock! at one o'clock! at one o'clock again! when it seemed the mysterious spouter was heading in a straight line, we followed it at a respectful distance, and our guide's voice rose in joy from the crow's nest: "and there's the fluke! it's a humpback!" the migration sometimes leaves younger whales behind, you see, and we found one, probably planning the whale-equivalent of a filmic eighties house party when one's parents are out of town. we followed his spouts and dives for an hour; we all knew where to look, but that joyous, lilting "and the fluke!" rang out each time he dove again. that happiness is as integral to my memory of the day as that magnificent tail.
though the whalewatching trip we took in iceland this september was my first, i think i can say that it was unlike what we would have experienced anywhere else. in mexico's sea of cortez, the harpoon-scarred gray whales of baja surface near boats, their babies at their sides: though we're utterly undeserving, they've forgiven the awestruck humans who come to them in peace. it's not like that in the north atlantic, not where we were. icelandic whalers ignore international regulations, and it's getting worse: in the 2010 hunt alone, 148 endangered fin whales and 60 minke whales were killed (the united states considered sanctions against iceland last year, but obama declined to invoke the pelly amendment). cognitive dissonance among icelanders outside of the whaling industry is pretty intense: while only 5% of them claim to eat whale regularly, some pollsters report that up to 75% of icelanders believe that whalers should be permitted to continue. japan imports the majority of the whalers' meat, but it's estimated that 40% of tourists in iceland eat it - which is where we came in. elding, the whalewatching company we chose, takes the "meet us don't eat us" campaign very seriously, and our golden-haired guide spent most of the trip from grindavík out to sea pleading with us on the whales' behalf. nothing abstract about that: she sounded close to tears at a few points, and there the minke whale was on the menu at dinner later that night, beside smoked puffin as part of a "taste of iceland" special. it's pronounced "minky," that whale's name. you can eat a minky whale.
that's the backstory - but the watching, now. we had planned to depart from reykjavik's old harbour, but the wind whipping into the bay wasn't interested in that; instead, we took the slowest double-decker bus in iceland (the only double-decker bus in iceland?) to a little fishing village forty minutes down the road. if the harbor at grindavík was considered placid, i shudder to think of what we left behind. i swallowed my gratis seasickness tablet like a good landlubber and have an unremarkable relationship with most vehicles, but when we left port and i went belowdecks for my industrial strength whalewatchin' onesie (the north atlantic is, unsurprisingly, colder than shit) i lost my abilities to walk in a straight line, stand upright, and speak english for a good twenty minutes or so. (extra-confusing when i rejoined joe, since the icelanders we met already thought he was a local. i think it was the beard.) that settled the issue of whether or not i would attempt creature-photography; in the absence of both fine motor skills and one of the semiautomatic, massive-barreled cameras the tourists around us were sporting (how close can you feel to a subject when there's a yard of equipment between you and your own lens, to say nothing of the distance between you and it?), i decided to document any whales we watched with, you know, my feelings.
september falls at the far reaches of whalewatching season, as most of the local baleen whale population migrates to warmer waters at summer's end, and it was clear from the way our guide was hyping dolphins that she didn't have high hopes for the afternoon. then, o then, the smallest spout at ten o'clock! at one o'clock! at one o'clock again! when it seemed the mysterious spouter was heading in a straight line, we followed it at a respectful distance, and our guide's voice rose in joy from the crow's nest: "and there's the fluke! it's a humpback!" the migration sometimes leaves younger whales behind, you see, and we found one, probably planning the whale-equivalent of a filmic eighties house party when one's parents are out of town. we followed his spouts and dives for an hour; we all knew where to look, but that joyous, lilting "and the fluke!" rang out each time he dove again. that happiness is as integral to my memory of the day as that magnificent tail.
10.26.12
101 in 1001 {III}: 018 visit the ashmolean [completed 09.18.12]
{satan, jean-jacques feuchère, c. 1836}
{unicorn violence}
{head of sobek the crocodile god}
{mummy wrapping detail}
emily nussbaum observed in the new yorker a few weeks ago that television networks, like people, have personalities. museums are people, i think; oxford's ashmolean could be my college roommate's casually fantastic mother, cece, who remarked at said roommate's rehearsal dinner last friday that she had spent part of the previous evening playing the hawaiian wedding song on a ukelele she'd built herself and inlaid with flames. elias ashmole, a seventeenth-century maximalist after my own heart, gave the university a magnificent shitload of curiosities and antiquities along with his financial support, and the institution that grew up around that collection is as byzantine as the collection itself. profusion of that kind is a mixed blessing: i spent half an hour pinballing angrily between recast statuary (c'mon, ashmole: your bag of tricks is that deep and you're giving me bootlegs?) and more pottery than i'll ever need to appreciate (sorry, pottery), convincing myself that my guidebook's insistence that guy fawkes's lantern was in room 27 or 29 was some sort of ultra-dry british humor. i then wandered into the egypt hall and spent another half hour lidless as a fish with the best mummy collection i've ever seen. that was the ashmolean's cece moment: respectable gallery, respectable gallery, p.s. let me just ninja in here with my mind-blowing awesome.
it remains a bit pathetic that in six months of living within a stroll of the ashmolean's statuary-and-pottery-and-lantern-and-mummies i managed not a single visit. in my defense, i spent half of those months with joe, and he's diverting (sometimes annoyingly so: when we were out in california for that wedding last weekend, my mother gave him her stanford class ring. my mother!). sloth had a way of working out for me, as it sometimes does; the museum underwent a massive rebuild in 2009, and the egypt hall reopened to great fanfare with its all-new (old) mummy army just last year. the 101 in 1001 list's lesson this time around, perhaps, is that armies of mummies arrive when one is best disposed to confront them. thank goodness, really, for that.
{satan, jean-jacques feuchère, c. 1836}
{unicorn violence}
{head of sobek the crocodile god}
{mummy wrapping detail}
emily nussbaum observed in the new yorker a few weeks ago that television networks, like people, have personalities. museums are people, i think; oxford's ashmolean could be my college roommate's casually fantastic mother, cece, who remarked at said roommate's rehearsal dinner last friday that she had spent part of the previous evening playing the hawaiian wedding song on a ukelele she'd built herself and inlaid with flames. elias ashmole, a seventeenth-century maximalist after my own heart, gave the university a magnificent shitload of curiosities and antiquities along with his financial support, and the institution that grew up around that collection is as byzantine as the collection itself. profusion of that kind is a mixed blessing: i spent half an hour pinballing angrily between recast statuary (c'mon, ashmole: your bag of tricks is that deep and you're giving me bootlegs?) and more pottery than i'll ever need to appreciate (sorry, pottery), convincing myself that my guidebook's insistence that guy fawkes's lantern was in room 27 or 29 was some sort of ultra-dry british humor. i then wandered into the egypt hall and spent another half hour lidless as a fish with the best mummy collection i've ever seen. that was the ashmolean's cece moment: respectable gallery, respectable gallery, p.s. let me just ninja in here with my mind-blowing awesome.
it remains a bit pathetic that in six months of living within a stroll of the ashmolean's statuary-and-pottery-and-lantern-and-mummies i managed not a single visit. in my defense, i spent half of those months with joe, and he's diverting (sometimes annoyingly so: when we were out in california for that wedding last weekend, my mother gave him her stanford class ring. my mother!). sloth had a way of working out for me, as it sometimes does; the museum underwent a massive rebuild in 2009, and the egypt hall reopened to great fanfare with its all-new (old) mummy army just last year. the 101 in 1001 list's lesson this time around, perhaps, is that armies of mummies arrive when one is best disposed to confront them. thank goodness, really, for that.
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