02.08.23

i forgot to tell you about the only winter course that matters, stanford's english 239:

In this course, we will read the three culminating novels of Henry James's 'major phase': The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. These are among the greatest and most profound novels in English. Many people also find them boring or unreadable. Unquestionably, their prose is difficult, with sentences so complex, wandering, and ambiguous, that the sense may be hard to construe. While very little action occurs, topics illuminated include love, money, sex-gender-sexuality, and evil. These three novels, taken seriously, have unusual powers to illuminate your future life, but also perhaps to mislead or ruin it. All are microscopic studies of social interaction, psychology, and selves. Recommended for very advanced and searching students and readers. Please enroll only if you find difficult prose manageable and rewarding, and you anticipate that these particular novels may speak to you at this stage of your life.

two of my dearest friends and i took a...memorable henry james class at stanford. one of us might have been a teen polymath who composed music while taking breezy notes; another might have celebrated the end of the term by writing a mass email about their and henry james's long-awaited breakup. i think we all still refer to the grad student who'd switch languages in the middle of statement-questions as the white worm. all course descriptions should roll like this.

the only interview that matters, in turn, is the hollywood reporter's harrison ford cover story. it unfolds as TED talks would if i had my way, and on a day that has otherwise been overwhelmingly fucking awful it has brought me peace.

When asked what he’d want written on his tombstone, Ford replies: “I wouldn’t want it to be  ‘Harrison Ford, blah-blah-blah, actor.’ I’d settle for ‘Was Useful.’ ” I point out that’s a particularly reductive way to sum up a life, and Ford shoots back: “Well, there’s not a lot of space on a tombstone.”

[...]

You’ve also rescued several people with your helicopter. How do stranded hikers react when they’re rescued by Harrison Ford?

Well, one time we picked up this woman who was hypothermic on the mountain. She barfed in my cowboy hat but didn’t know who I was until the next day. I stopped doing it because we would be lucky enough to find somebody and then they’d be on Good Morning America talking about “a hero pilot.” It’s nothing fucking like that. It’s a team effort. It’s lame to think about it that way.

[...]

[Shrinking co-creator Bill] Lawrence made it sound like you have a boyish and youthful side that’s very different, and suggested it’s more the real you than what people tend to see.

Do you fish?

No. I mean, not since I was a kid.

There’s this thing called “match the hatch.” It’s when there’s a natural bug in the air the fish are eating and you use an artificial fly that’s the same color. I have a protective coloration. I try to blend in. That’s what I do. When I’m getting dressed, if people are going to be wearing a suit, I wear a suit. If people are wearing blue jeans, I’m wearing blue jeans. I’m comfortable in all kinds of company. If they’re serious, I’m serious. They’re not serious, I’m not serious. And if they’re too fucking serious, I’m not serious. (Laughs.) I don’t know why people have an expectation of me. I come in all colors. I don’t know who’s going to show up. But it’s usually me and it looks familiar.

One of your majors in college was philosophy. Has any of that stayed with you?

Yeah. There’s a Protestant theologian named Paul Tillich who wrote that if you have trouble with the word “God,” take whatever is central and most meaningful to your life and call that God. My mother was Jewish, my father was Catholic, and I was raised Democrat — my moral purpose was being a Democrat with the big D. But it didn’t apply to a political point of view so much as it applied to nature. I didn’t have any religious construct, but I think nature and God are the same thing. The mysterious origin of life — science tells us how it happened, prophecy tells us another story. I found that everything in nature — the complexity, the biodiversity, the symbiotic relationships — is the same thing other people attribute to God. … Now aren’t you glad you asked that question? You want to get back to the funny shit?

I am glad I asked. I haven’t heard you say that before.

I’ve been saving it just for you, man.

04.23.20

was the neighborhood guy who masked his mini-pinscher prescient? i hear that two cats have contracted coronavirus, though the news, thank goodness, seems to be that they will recover and that they won't pass their setbacks to their humans.

we persist. i've been seized with a wild urge to chain-smoke, à la every fictional world-wearied beat cop confronted with the eleventh-hour, extra-grisly case that will end up defining her or his career, and have spit on that impulse by reactivating my long-dormant pokémon go account (abandoned in the summer of '16 when i realized that i'd gone three weeks without talking to my mother).* i sure hope that pokémon go isn't a villainous, terrible app; it pings my interests in animal husbandry, hoarding, quantified physical activity, vexing the neighbors' kids, and so much more.**

that's self-care in these parts, then: weekly grocery runs for the neighbors, daily walks with joe, near-constant local-tween-owning. i've been quilting and watching my brilliant friend. getting into fistfights with bus stops is totally normal.


*on my first post-pokémon walk i stumbled upon A LIVE EEL IN THE STREET sine-waving on land like a regular old black snake that couldn't breathe; i did my damndest to catch and return it to its grand street live-seafood tupperware tub and have a new appreciation for that whole slippery-as-an-eel thing. i saw said eel en route to my local bank branch, where i was to explain that someone had accidentally deposited a random $18,000 into my checking account (true story, i was mixed up with another, fancier contractor); when i arrived my hands were eel-slimy and bowery-grimy, so i wiped them on the carpet before i approached the teller. "oh hi," [spreads mysterious goop on the floor] "i have a lot of money that isn't mine."

**on this afternoon's walk, pokémon go taught me that charlie parker lived on avenue b; while tech will unquestionably be one of the deaths of us, i will take that factoid with me to hell.

04.05.20

CONSUMED: A PARTIAL LIST.

bored to death (series). it's entirely possible that i would have been immune to bored to death's charms if i'd seen it when it first aired on hbo a decade ago; it's very wes-anderson-meets-michael-chabon brooklyn-precious, and with the exception of kristen wiig, its female cast doesn't get much in the way of open road. because we're seeing it after i saw ted danson through four seasons of the good place—i really loved the good place—and while the good, the bad, and the brooklyn of this city is largely off-limits to us, i find myself getting misty over, like, scenes at veselka and old town.* creator/writer/nude-cameo jonathan ames distills something very specific about book and magazine publishing at the beginning of this decade, and while i didn't actually live in greenpoint or park slope in those years, i spent rather a lot of time there; i'd say he's gotten them right, too. also, why haven't we been to brighton beach? why haven't we gone to spa castle? mistakes were made in The Time Before. also also, i think i might be putting together some sort of ted danson retrospective over here. anyway, bored to death: the stoner-noir rejoinder to sex and the city i didn't know i needed, even though that ubiquitous pop-fictional-character personality quiz told me i was an 80% match with carrie motherfucking bradshaw.

game night (film). i see movies at weird film festivals, on international flights, and at, like, dine-in theaters in brooklyn, so i was ignorant of game night's existence until my cousin dan recommended it in our neverending twitter direct-message thread; he said it was one of the best comedies of the decade and as he is a comedian, i decided to listen to him. readers, it is an extremely enjoyable movie! from where i'm sitting it's superior to knives out (another quirky-mysterious semi-thriller i considered pretty cheesy, as daniel craig did not work at all for me; please don't tell the dine-in theaters that or they might not let us come back), in fact. casting directors, please hire rachel mcadams and jesse plemons (especially jesse plemons) for all the comic things.

temporary (book). i'm tempted to call temporary the best book i've read this year so far, but i've had the good fortune to read several boss books over the past few months; let's say it's top three for sure. the very last emily books title and hilary leichter's first novel (expanded from a short story published in n+1 in 2012), temporary follows an unnamed female narrator ostensibly in search of "the steadiness," or an end to the increasingly-absurd fill-in work she's been doing since she was a little girl (when she was hired to open and close each of the doors in an empty house at fixed intervals). she is a human barnacle, and a pirate, and a sort-of-host for the cremains of a captain of industry; she sounds a bit like a lewis carroll character, a kelly link character, a helen oyeyemi character (link and oyeyemi both praised the book, unsurprisingly). it's bone-dry, poignant, and very, very funny, and i think about it a lot as i run errands for my shut-in neighbors for free, shoulder to shoulder with the gig workers running errands for a different set of shut-ins, for lousy pay. C told me today that she drove up to tompkins square park and bought some pastries at the farmers' market "because it was outside;" she also told me that she sings a short song to daffodils blooming in the park across the street from our apartments each morning. i have mostly lost the ability to judge anyone for anything, though i remain dead certain that the adults biking recreationally on city sidewalks are domestic terrorists.

*neither of which is in brooklyn, ironically.

04.04.20

"survival is insufficient," a line i've always associated with emily st. john mandel's wonderful station eleven (and a line my first manager at ye olde charity bookshop had tattooed on his arm) first popped up in a star trek: voyager episode; thank you, seven of nine. in other news, does it surprise me that emily st. john mandel kinda looks like canadian, literary imperator furiosa these days? it does not.

i lost my sense of smell abruptly and kind of dramatically yesterday morning, and i did not keep my cool about it. steve puked on our floor, so i swooped in to comfort him, mop up his yodels, and disinfect our terrible parquet with the lemony, aggressively bleachy bottle of disinfectant i bought a couple of weeks ago. couldn't smell any of it, which made me cry a little. i told the neighbors i didn't think i could shop for them in the afternoon after all, but that mysterious anosmia seems to have blossomed into today's generic seasonal allergies. this evening i informed joe in the gentlest possible terms that i couldn't listen to any more lyle lovett, and when he switched the record out for let's dance and stevie ray vaughan's boss guitar galloped in with "modern love" matty dashed into the room, leapt on the coffee table, and farted directly into my san judas tadeo prayer candle. bowie is affecting! my senses registered all of that, for better or for worse, so i now feel much better about going to the grocery store and pharmacy.

02.27.20

so i was watching an *exquisitely* bad supernatural romance last night, and the hero—a very good actor, and the sort of person you'd really dig in to believe if the lines he was delivering were plausible at all—announced in a super-flat voice that he was madly in love, after, oh, three weeks and for the first time in like 1,500 years with the heroine. "same," she more or less said as one would announce that they'd been tagged in an instagram photo of someone's cocktail. this has probably obvious to everyone but me for a very long time, but i feel like i just understood that fictional characters make super-explicit romantic declarations because writers and directors are either not talented enough or too lazy to show them acting on affection for one another the way actual humans do. so people feel less-than when their own lovers don't show up with TO ME YOU ARE PERFECT signs when actually-actually a move like that is just a big failure of art to imitate life. just me? okay. i'm going to keep watching the show, though.

07.12.19

CONSUMED: A PARTIAL LIST.

horses and divorces (bar). joe and i visited our local honky tonk a few weeks ago and spied a poster for a bar that advertised a rosé super soaker as part of its fourth of july party. fellow tonkers told us that it was a burt-reynolds-themed sister joint a few blocks away, and i insisted on stopping by—not because it was the fourth of july (it was not) or because i was interested in being sprayed with rosé, but because i appreciated the terrible audacity of that establishment's plans—on our way home. we encountered and eventually exchanged soulful hugs with both the bouncer (who had shared a ride with joe from manhattan a few hours earlier, and was a buddy of ours from the tonk) and a mancunian olympic judo fighter (who shared our opinion that morrissey must be stopped). i left my phone there after hearing a-ha's "the sun always shines on TV" and demanding to buy the perpetrator a drink,* and when joe went back to williamsburg to retrieve it, he met another mancunian who attempted to take him home. horses and divorces has shag carpet on its ceiling.

los espookys (series). i am, for the most part, no good at watching shows as they air; season-long netflix-ish drops work for me, but i can't be bothered to tune in at the same time every week for series that aren't game of thrones or the handmaid's tale, both of which end/ed up making me feel uncomfortable and, oddly, hungry. enter los espookys, which caught my eye on a bathroom wall because i thought it was a band with an especially good name. i looked it up when i got home, as olds do, and reader! it is the six-part (this season) story of a group of friends in an unnamed latin american country that produces scrappy horror scenarios. it is mostly in spanish, and it is aspirationally absurd. i have rewatched each of the five episodes that have aired. you are much cooler than i am and already know all of this already, but OH MY GOD LOS ESPOOKYS.

trader joe's tofu spring rolls (foodstuff). while i understand that my longstanding amazon boycott is probably ludicrous when one considers all of the big tech and big-box properties i continue to enrich: fuck amazon, fuck it right in the ear.** my grocery shopping became considerably more difficult when amazon bought whole foods, and i was, if i'm being honest, pleased when trader joe's moved into the lower east side. it's been a godsend for styling props for the craft projects i've published over the last year—i'm good at foraging for floral arrangements, but i'm not that good—and though i can mostly ignore its superplastickypackaged treats, these little vegan slugs are A Thing. you've got to drench them in sriracha, but friends. i am trying to roll into my locals, spread my apron, and ask them to fill it with millet, and in the interim i am >75% questionable tofu spring rolls, and content. (con-TENT, not CON-tent.)

*it was the bartender, and i sketched him out, of course. "THIS WAS THE FIRST TAPE I EVER OWNED AND I BOUGHT IT WITH QUARTERS FROM MY ALLOWANCE!" "to...[clink] the eighties?"

**this was a problem last year, as i'd been doing a brisk business in lifestyle shopping roundups, and one of my biggest writing outlets transitioned to affiliated stories. i miss that money.

07.12.18

the dirty dozen, FIFA edition {some of the places joe and i have watched world cup matches this june and july}

jw marriott chicago (chicago, IL). the first of the hotels in last month's Circle of Life saga had talking elevators that sounded like judi dench and interminable hallways that reminded me of the overlook, all of which i found impossibly charming. our room and television were large, the air conditioning was robust, and it was a fine place to recover from the heat wave and reflect on our friends' nuptials while yelling at soccer players.

replay andersonville (chicago, IL). the smugness i felt after filing the first of my on-the-road freelance assignments quickly gave way to humiliation when i failed to acquit myself honorably with replay's free(!) arcade games (why don't you love me as i love you, midwestern galaga?). no matter. a single triumph is still a triumph.

the robey (chicago, IL). a hoteltonight hero that came through for us when o'hare made it clear that we weren't flying out of chicago for at least another 24 hours, the robey upgraded our room and provided us with a pot of coffee to pair with our first game of the morning on tuesday. bless the robey.

links taproom (chicago, IL). my second on-the-road freelance-assignment filing found us at a mostly-empty but very friendly sportstravaganza in wicker park, where i wore a tee shirt joe ran out to purchase at the bookstore we'd visited in search of a vintage copy of 1984 the previous afternoon (since o'hare had flown our luggage to california, despite our pleas). an empty pub is actually a pretty good place to work, assuming you can find a table that doesn't wiggle (and i did!). also, there's soccer. coffeehouses are for suckers.

sonesta silicon valley (san jose, CA). after another five-hour barrage of delays at o'hare, we were permitted to fly to northern california, where it was far too late for us to drive to my sister and brother-in-law's treehouse on the coast. we drove instead through a series of office parks and had a second spur-of-the-moment hotel date, this time at a comfortingly unrenovated retreat for pilots? (i resisted the urge to tackle the gaggle of them checking in the next morning and demand to know one had broken our spirits in chicago 12-72 hours ago.) while much of the valley looks suspiciously like pop-up ads or holograms projected from smartphones, sonesta looked to me like a slightly more corporate version of stanford sierra camp, and i slept (and watched television) like a rock there.

royal pacific motor inn (san francisco, CA). our old favorite (a wonderful japantown hotel with a toy machine in the lobby) is now part of an upscale chain that has standardized it and might now require actual organs from its guests, so we settled on a lodge that, like the one we found on long island for the night of this spring's broken social scene concert, was somewhat disappointingly non-murder-y. its television was small and old, but since we spent the majority of our time in the city with my other sister and her family and had just been introduced to the wonderful world of collecting and trading panini stickers, it was just fine (mostly i was excited about having room on our bed to muster our new two-dimensional squads). it was also very gratifying to be adhering to parts of our schedule that we'd planned more than 12 hours in advance—that two-day stay was edenic. parking was free! free!

nickies bar (san francisco, CA). i was excited about seeing our first game with my sister and her baby at mad dog in the fog, a haight spot that's captivated my imagination since college—i would pass it on the bus once every few months (the walk plus train ride plus walk plus bus ride to haight-ashbury from my place took like two hours each way, so i didn't do it very often, and i was underage, so i couldn't get in anyway). mad dog in the fog has a strict NO BABIES policy (the nerve!), though, so we holed up at nickies a few blocks away and had a fine old time. our server there came over to admire our infant, which was a good call on her part, for he is awfully admirable. and super huge! probably he won't even get carded circa the next world cup. she was in a remarkably good mood for someone who'd been tackling sports fans since eight in the morning, that server. we left a generous tip.

san francisco athletic club (san francisco, CA). hats off to the cavernous SFAC for having a huge corner booth at which my sister's actual baby and my and joe's soccer-sticker-album baby had plenty of room to spread out and do our thing. screens were massive, memorabilia was old-school and charming, and i'd have happily eaten lunch there if we hadn't been en route to the mission for a last-minute taqueria pancho villa pilgrimage. (my burrito was not as exquisite as i'd been hoping it would be, but my god, pancho villa still beats new york burritos hollow.)

olde sonoma public house (sonoma, CA). i've been to many a bar that offers take-out menus from local spots and lets you call something in, but i have never had a server from a neighboring restaurant roll up to my table with dishes and silverware. you astonish, sonoma! we and the bartenders then turned out to be the only germany supporters in a strip-mall watering hole full of swedish soccer enthusiasts; you astonish again, sonoma! i learned that day that i bellow when germany scores, and that one should always order more quesadillas than one believes one needs. also my cousins are shorter than i thought they were (we had a family reunion later that afternoon).

dog house pub (st. john, USVI). there was a minor sports-related freakout in cruz bay last tuesday when it became clear that the FOX affiliate out of puerto rico (which had supposedly aired every other world cup match) decided to show valkyrie instead, which conspiracy theorists insisted was somehow germany's revenge after getting knocked out of the tournament? i was unaware that telemundo was an option (and was unable to work the TV in my suite back at the resort anyway), so i wandered down to the marina and found a place where someone had managed to direct the english team's wonky live stream from his smartphone to a bar's television. i probably should have been napping instead of sweltering with a bunch of colombia supporters, but i did meet and have a lovely conversation with a woman who'd come down with FEMA to help with long-term economic recovery on the islands. look, ma! i networked!

videology bar & cinema (brooklyn, NY). i had yet another story to file before i could join joe back in videology's super-boss screening room the day after i returned from st. john, so i spent the first half of the game formatting jpegs while listening to brazilians and belgians scream and groan. i can't listen to music while i work, but that was surprisingly okay. you definitely shouldn't go see the final there on sunday, though—it's a terrible place (okay, it's the best place, but keep that to yourself.)

barleycorn (new york, ny). we'd intended to head back to videology, and i'd woken up extra-early to file two stories so i could head to videology without a laptop, but a surprise meeting meant joe had to stay downtown. "do you remember that place where we met that couple at the bar and they shared their pizza with us?" he asked. "we could go there, they have the game." (it took me a while to figure out which place he meant, actually—strangers like to give us stuff.). i have questions: who are these suited dudes who can roll into a bar at two in the afternoon and not work there? they did not have laptops. are world cup matches the new three-martini lunches? they were definitely england fans, though, and they were pretty bummed. we decided that luka modrić is an elf; he looks like he has access to special, extra-nutritious travel wafers. i am proud to say that we have collected every last sticker for his team.


*i often refer to our little cat as mad dog in the fog.

12.26.16

the missus and i, geeky tv fans both, started watching doctor who 53 years after the first doctor stepped out of his T.A.R.D.I.S. and approximately one month before all doctors disappeared from netflix's streaming catalog, which means that we've limped along with actual discs all year and that i almost always know when the doctor's going to regenerate or lose a companion, since box sets always feature main-character portraits on their covers and it's incredibly difficult to make sure you've got everything in the proper order in your queue, what with christmas specials, bonus discs, spinoffs, and animated special events (we just got to that one). i try ever so hard to avoid spoilers when preparing to watch shows and movies—i cross my eyes when buying movie tickets, i hide back issues of the new yorker from myself, i pour out the last of my tea without checking out the shapes the dregs have formed—but i always end up knowing when, say, i'm going to have to start preparing myself to let go of david tennant. (what a doctor,* that tennant! it horrifies longtime whovians to learn that i saw him in both jessica jones and broadchurch before i saw him as a time lord, which connoisseurs assured me is Peak Tennant. [i now agree.]) of course, i also know that whatever was going on with billie piper's teeth circa "turn left" resolves itself before her next cameo, and that's a relief.

we accidentally leapt into season five before watching all of the weird 2008-ish spinoffs and semiseries, which means both that i'm trying to work through complicated feelings about matt smith by reminding myself that there are still a few odd unwatched tennant episodes out there, trapped in the postal system like paleozoic insects in amber, and that i'm pretty sure i need to get a T.A.R.D.I.S. suit before we visit sarah and judd in the dominican republic in february. or a dalek suit? if one could but glimpse the multiverses swimwear decisions create.


*in pecking around for that link i discovered DT married georgia moffett—the fifth doctor's daughter in real life—after she played his daughter in the current series. overseas television romances are so much more exciting than hollywood gossip, man. (billie piper was married to laurence fox from inspector lewis! i realize i'm the last person on earth to learn that, but still!)

09.17.14: on anthony bourdain (part I)

the library emailed me a few days ago to let me know that the anthony bourdain crime novel i'd reserved was going to get reshelved if i didn't come by to pick it up. i am weirdly vulnerable to admonitions from the NYPL and considered rushing across town over my lunch break, but internet, i think it's okay for me to walk away now. i've sat beside joe through hours and hours of a cook's tour and no reservations and various extra-special top chef episodes, i have read kitchen confidential, and i have read medium raw. i feel like i can say, with the conviction of a diligent viewer and reader rather than reflexive righteous vegetarian indignation, that anthony bourdain is a—but let me explain.

i've bristled at bourdain's casual pot shots at vegetarians for years, but i felt i should consider some of his more thoughtful remarks before making conclusions. i started with kitchen confidential, his blockbuster memoir, in which i learned that

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It's healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I've worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. Oh, I'll accommodate them, I'll rummage around for something to feed them, for a 'vegetarian plate', if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine.

tony, toni, toné. for ethical vegetarians like me, the consumption of meat and the pure enjoyment of food are mutually exclusive. my body is nothing like a temple (i was a pack-a-day smoker for 11 of the 22 years i've been vegetarian), and i don't give two shits about how much healthier or sicker i'd be if i ate like he does. i've gotten pretty good at telling when a chef is welcoming a challenge and when straying from the side salad will cost me $25 and an hour of staring at a pile of listlessly steamed vegetables called something like "the haystack." kitchen confidential's vegetarians aren't people like me, though, or people at all: they're just jokes, part of the shtick bourdain turns on for appearances like his larry king live segment (and "rematch") with jonathan safran foer. don't we get it?

bourdain's follow-up memoir, medium raw ("a bloody valentine to the world of food and the people who cook"), wastes no time in waddling back to the inflatable punching clown that is The Vegetarian Perspective in a Tony Bourdain Book. he opens by covering his head with a napkin and devouring ortolan, an endangered (and protected) songbird that had the bad luck to be blinded, force-fed, drowned, roasted, and stuffed into his yap.* bourdain is uncompromising in his pursuit of self-satisfaction, you guys! zero fucks given re: jonathan franzen's beloved birds (aside from the ones franzen himself ate before he could get to them, maybe)! in case we waterheads were still unclear about his feelings on our feelings, he doubles down on them in his chapter on meat:

PETA doesn't want stressed animals to be cruelly crowded into sheds, ankle-deep in their own crap, because they don't want any animals to die—ever—and basically think that chickens should, in time, gain the right to vote. I don't want animals stressed or crowded or treated cruelly or inhumanely because that makes them provably less delicious.

that deliciousness point isn't universally accepted, actually, as cnn reported last year.** the main point here, of course, is that improvements in animal welfare which benefit human consumers directly and immediately are the only improvements a reasonable person can care about. and how he cares! bourdain is so grossed out by factory farms' cheap, shitty meat that he's developed classy socratic dialogues to steer his little daughter away from fast food ("Is it true that if you eat a hamburger at McDonald's it can make you a ree-tard?"). refusing to consume animals for their sake, on the other hand, is acceptable strictly in the context of an ethos too exotic to criticize with confidence.

Okay. I am genuinely angry—still—at vegetarians. That's not shtick. Not angry at them personally, mind you—but in principle. A shocking number of vegetarians and even vegans have come to my readings, surprised me with an occasional sense of humor, refrained from hurling animal blood at me—even befriended me. I have even knowingly had sex with one, truth be told.*** But what I've seen of the world in the past nine years has, if anything, made me angrier at anyone not a Hindu who insists on turning their nose up at a friendly offer of meat.

I don't care what you do in your home, but the idea of a vegetarian traveler in comfortable shoes waving away the hospitality—the distillation of a lifetime of training and experience—of, say, a Vietnamese pho vendor (or Italian mother-in-law, for that matter) fills me with spluttering indignation.

No principle is, to my mind, worth that; no Western concept of "is it a pet or is it meat" excuses that kind of rudeness.

one wonders what would happen if bourdain rolled into a deeply authentic place in, say, southeast asia and was offered a binder of his host's finest kiddie porn. no principle is worth the unforgivable condescension of morality out of context, amirite? bourdain's parenthetical about his mother-in-law is very nearly too pathetic to address at all, but i would note that when i was a junior in high school, my beloved boyfriend's ultra-catholic italian family invited me to stay at their home the night before we all went up to pasadena for the rose parade and the rose bowl; when his mother served us "vegetarian" soup made, alas, with chicken stock, i at sixteen was able to root around and find the balls to thank her and decline it as politely as possible. she made me sleep under the christmas tree that night, and two decades later i think she still calls him every now and again to make sure we haven't somehow gotten back together.

"I feel too lucky—now more than ever—too acutely aware what an incredible, unexpected privilege it is to travel this world and enjoy the kindness of strangers to ever, ever be able to understand how one could do anything other than say yes, yes, yes."

you know what? yes is easy. yes is sucking up to your mother-in-law. heaven forbid you should actually have to think on your feet and come up with a gracious way to turn down someone's offer of hospitality for moral reasons. i'd sleep under that christmas tree again.

to be continued.

*that's the traditional method, anyway; bourdain claims his ortolan was merely hoodwinked with a cloth and then soaked with armagnac after death, which makes the whole scene completely respectable.

**from cnn's piece on dog smuggling from thailand to vietnam:

A common belief is that stress and fear releases hormones that improve the taste of the meat, so the dogs are placed in stress cages that restrict their movement.

Eventually, the dogs are either bludgeoned to death or have their throats cut in front of other dogs who are awaiting the same fate. In some cases, they've been known to be skinned alive.

"Dogs are highly intelligent animals so if you kill a dog and you have a whole cage of dogs next to the one that's being killed, those dogs that are going to be killed next know what's going on," [the director of a Hanoi-based animal welfare group] said.

an opening scene for bourdain's next book, perhaps?

***[crickets]

05.03.14

UNEXPECTED INTEL AND ITS SOURCES

jon snow's eventual fate in a song of ice and fire / googling jon snow of channel 4 news
my office might have a comparatively reasonable severance policy* / lindsey palmer's pretty in ink
of mice and men's ultra-grisly denouement / hilton als's scathing review of the james franco production

*no worries, i remain employed.

03.15.13

on black cats of all kinds, if you feel that the universe is cold and vacant, know that there is an independent music venue in our nation's capital where, at seven o'clock on saturday evenings, hellmouth happy hour brings people together for an episode of buffy the vampire slayer on a backstage screen, drink specials, and a collective feeling, for forty minutes, at least, that all is not lost. the black cat screened two episodes when we were there a few saturdays ago, and then their jukebox had an old birthday party album in its first slot, and a cure v. smiths dance party broke out around nine. buffy anne summers, you save the world a lot.

07.13.12

[The stories] were all about men, mostly in their late twenties or early thirties, mostly with an aspiration that they'd given up because of a marriage or a dead relative or a fear about not being good enough: the singer-songwriter who performs as a cowboy-clown at children's birthday parties and finds himself doing a gig at the house of his high school girlfriend; the minor-league baseball player forced to decide between new love and an unexpected ascension to the majors. There was a sweetness and earnestness to the stories that Juliet had at first found winning. The men were smart and self-effacing, the details about domestic routines spot-on, the characters' neuroses believable and exaggerated ever so slightly for comic effect. But Juliet also noticed in that third read that the women of the book were all blandly noble and long-suffering, and while the man-child narrator worked through his feelings of inadequacy, making such frequent comment about his failings that you couldn't help but think extremely well of him, to believe him enlightened, his girl stood by, full of spunky good sense and patience, never angry, never granted the luxury to be small or selfish. The clown story, "On the Redemption of Roy Rogers," ended with the narrator, still in grease paint, giving his high school girlfriend a long, tender kiss while her husband and the children at the party are outside taking pony rides (and of course there had already been a comically gloomy contemplation of the pony's being a gelding). "I kissed her," the last line went, "reclaimed her, while outside her husband and the pony walked a slow and never-ending circle, no sunset in sight."

[...]

"You want to tell me something about my book, I suppose. Well, enlighten me, Miss New York Press."
"That's Mrs. New York Press," Juliet said. "To you."
"Mrs., then. Enlighten me."
"If they were to make movies out of your stories, John Cusack would play the lead in every one of them."

(holly goddard jones, "the right way to end a story,"* tin house #52)

tin house's summer reading issue also boasts "annie duels the sun," a boss angie wang cover (wang's work frequently features heroic gals; "despite being stalked, bombed, or forced into submission, these young women persevere. if they're not already in escape mode or recovery, they are ready to unleash their power"), and an impressively plausible celebration of cooking with friends, a middlebrow, tv-themed collection of recipes developed on the down-low by jack bishop (who helped launch cook's illustrated and set the tasting protocols for america's test kitchen). i just ordered it as a bonus gift for the wedding we're attending next weekend.

*(that excerpt is not the end of the story.)

09.24.10



i turned my phone back on as i walked down grand street last night; wabes and i had just seen SWINTON in i am love. i'd received this photo from joe, and a text message: "...that spells apple." your sweet nothings are quotes from the stand, right?

08.18.10

THUNDERTOME: ROUND 22

SURVIVOR: tree of smoke (denis johnson)*
CHALLENGER: in the woods (tana french)

this foreign thrillers thing is getting out of hand; sensing an opening after my talk of arnaldur indriðason's icelandic excellence and acceptance of the girl with the dragon tattoo, amazon has started recommending things like the indian bride (inspector sejer mysteries) and my friend megan passed me tana french's in the woods. the latter is set in knocknaree, a blustery green corner of ireland that's especially nice to read about when new york in august wants you dead, and full of good-looking dublin homicide detectives. call it a thoughtfully embellished procedural, a cross between inspector lewis** and the second season of the wire.*** one of said detectives, the unreliably-narratin' rob ryan (fond of telling us how much he lies and doesn't notice), grew up in knocknaree and suffered a mysterious trauma in the nearby woods; when a young girl's body is found there some twenty years later, he catches the case and extremely awkward conversations with locals ensue.

it's hard to talk about in the woods at length without spoiling something - megan told me i needed to read this first novel of french's because it introduces a better novel's main character, and the act of reading this one without sniffing around its sequel (the likeness) nearly killed me - but i will say that french has something of kazuo ishiguro (never let me go)'s knack for articulating relationships' emotional temperatures, which is a pleasant surprise in a genre more concerned with suspense than regular old non-stabby interpersonal tension. in the woods's b-plot is the story of rob's relationship with his female partner; its overall arc is somewhat predictable, but it's described beautifully. the a-plot, in turn, certainly does its job: while i've been suspended like a fly in the sap that is the remainder of our october issue here at the magazine and haven't had time to read at home, i was perhaps the only ticketholder who didn't mind waiting out the rain for sunday night's capeman performance in central park. i tucked myself under an eave at the delacorte, imagined myself in ireland, and was perfectly content.

VICTOR: i'd rather have in the woods in my purse, but tree of smoke's still king of the shelf.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 wire-watchers, which was your favorite season?

02 what's your personal late-night-at-the-office record? i'm now at a quarter past midnight, but i'm stepping up for another go tonight, i think.

03 how was your weekend? i've missed you guys, what with the office eating my life.

*previous battle here.

**if you've spent time in oxford and aren't yet watching inspector lewis, incidentally, get on that.

***the best season, for my money.

05.12.10

THUNDERTOME: ROUND 15

SURVIVOR: let the great world spin (colum mccann)*
CHALLENGER: more tales of the city (armistead maupin)

we meet again, maupin! i tried to relax and give this series a chance to take hold, and it worked: much as i pawed through the twilight series in the course of something like a fortnight (ten days of which were spent waiting for breaking dawn to come out), i've gone all junior high on the second collection of maupin's columns, the city after next more tales of the city. maupin's writing reads a bit like stephenie meyer's, in a sense; he doesn't stuff paragraphs with adjectives as enthusiastically she does, thank goodness (a meyer passage at its best/worst is like those hickory farms sausages that bleed cheese), but he knows his way around a cliffhanger, and his plots are propulsive in a similar way.

more tales of the city is both soapier than its predecessor - its twists include a quasi-secret scandinavian sex change operation, the acapulco debut of an amnesia victim named burke** who vomits every time he sees a rose, and the improper use of medical waste*** - and more serious: the chapter in which michael tolliver comes out to his conservative parents is really lovely, and the relationship that develops between him and jon the gynecologist is, in all seriousness, quite affecting. following it in a mainstream daily newspaper must have been incredibly meaningful for gay (and straight) readers, even though its fellow plots are rather silly. an unexpected development, that: the flourishes and coincidences that have endeared maupin to me also problematize his serious content's emotional impact. i should be cutting him some slack there, maybe: it seems that most people don't let dickensian coincidences, for example, spoil their appreciation of dickensian pathos. at the end of the day, my only real beef with the flourishes is that in the very best one, when mary ann vomits from the catwalk eight stories above the congregation at grace cathedral, she's still able to get out of the building without being stopped ("[t]he people below hardly knew what hit them.") reader, the barfed-upon know exactly what hits them.

VICTOR: let the great world spin. much as i love episcopalian cannibal cults, mccann remains the emotional heavy.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 are you a fan of sudsy drama?

02 do dickensian coincidences bother you?

03 has anyone ever barfed on you? come, let's heal together.

*previous battle here.

**burke is one of modern melodrama's most distinguished names, you see.

***that one's especially majestic.

05.10.10

THUNDERTOME: ROUND 14

SURVIVOR: let the great world spin (colum mccann)*
CHALLENGER: tales of the city (armistead maupin)

like the hound of the baskervilles (which appeared monthly in the strand beginning in 1901) and the pickwick papers (produced in installments, like all of dickens's subsequent novels, with advertisements and illustrations), maupin's "tales of the city" crept into the world bit by bit; first published in the san francisco chronicle, it seems to have appeared there daily for a few years before hopping over to the san francisco examiner. unlike those stories (and more like sex and the city, apartment 3-G, or three's company), it follows a handful of twenty- and thirtysomethings (and their eccentric landlady) as they collide with each other, various bay area types, and illicit substances.** the main characters live at 28 barbary lane, a leafy corner of san francisco's russian hill based on macondray lane (a five minute walk up the hill from our old place on green street c. 2000-2003, as it happens). they are fond of one-liners and steam baths. they have a lot of polyester and a lot of sex. their adventures are unapologetically soapy and usually about four pages long, which makes sense, given that they were published daily in a newspaper.

i'm told that maupin's stories and characters are wildly popular; they became a celebrated miniseries,*** are in the process of becoming a musical, and tend to be covered with breathless quotes (michael tolliver, one of maupin's main characters, "is arguably one of the most widely loved characters in contemporary fiction," per a number of reviewers). how did i miss this? is it that i'm of another generation? comparatively prudish? a big old SF hater?

i think that last part is the clincher, actually. i've never been in love with san francisco, but seven considerably happier years elsewhere have gotten me to the point where i very nearly wish it ill. maupin's "tales of the city" is a love letter to the bay area in the same way people say carrie bradshaw's real love affair is with new york city (blech),**** and loving maupin's san francisco seems to entail loving marijuana, dancing, and free love. reader, i have no patience for any of those things - and it would be safest for all of us for me to skip speaking of hippies. little bits of maupin's city are also part of mine - the marina safeway, bless it, is still a weird pickup scene, and there will always be something magical about the rooftops in russian hill and the swensen's at hyde and union (it's the only one that still makes its own ice cream, you know) - but i have trouble loving its denizens (though i should note that i agree completely with their sexual politics). i'm giving this maupin experiment time to take, mind you - i picked up the first three novels in a single thrift store visit, so michael tolliver might still end up meaning something to me. for now, let's call tales of the city high-spirited sudsiness.

VICTOR: let the great world spin. mccann has reach, and tales isn't nimble these days.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 how do you feel about san francisco?

02 are you able to appreciate art which celebrates things you don't especially like?

03 what's the druggiest book you've ever read?

04 can you recommend a good free standing air conditioner? that's not especially literary, but since you're here and all.

*previous battle here.

**emphasis on the substances; it's been a few years since i last read burroughs, but i think these kids might out-drug him.

***which, full disclosure, starred my beloved ex-boss's sister.

****i was helping drive a carful of bread across the city for a friend's event last year when my co-volunteer spied the public library and went, "oh, those stairs always make me think of when carrie and big got married!" no context, just carrie and big. weird.

04.20.10: the dirty dozen, part II {watching it}

04



it's just as well that i didn't buy one of the high-concept bird feeders i eyed before we moved; in the six months we've been in the new apartment, not a single bird has ventured up to the eighteenth floor.* happily, tugboats continue to chortle by with satisfying regularity; new york was the tugboat capital of the world until the 1930s, you know. last week's especially substantial new yorker, the one with the story of the doomed aeronauts, also profiled a tugboating family and their business; apparently the action's in louisiana and the gulf now.

"This place was no different than the Wild West or a gold strike in the Yukon," one tugboat captain told me. "It was a boomtown without any morals. You'd get friendly with someone in a bar and wake up the next morning on a boat heading into the Gulf. Shanghaiing was a reliable trade."

Things have calmed down since then, but only intermittently, and the Cajuns still try to keep their business in the family. One local phone book lists numbers by nickname as well as by given name--Jimmy (White Bean) Sonier, Michael (Possum) St. Tierre--as if it were still a sleepy fishing community and not a global hub.

[...]

To change course or speed [on an early tug], the captain had to send his orders down to the engineer via a system of gongs and bells threaded through the boat, as if phoning a foreign country. The busiest tugs...averaged more than five hundred bell commands in an eight-hour shift. On trickier maneuvers, the rate could rise to six per minute.

it goes without saying that i'd like to rig a system of gongs and bells in our apartment immediately, even though most of the messages will be about fritos.

05 celebrities v. giant inflatable rats: slippery-as-an-eel** edition

i passed jerry seinfeld and a colin-quinn-looking guy (probably colin quinn, now that i think about it) en route to the office this morning; seinfeld was wearing villainous teeny tiny round black glasses and cultivating an i-imprisoned-sydney-bristow vibe.

rats: 4.5
star: 14

06 we're going to a tribeca film festival screening next monday, huzzah! though joe's soccer and drugs documentary was sold out, we secured tickets for a slasher movie about hong kong real estate; i am well pleased. the slasher screening overlaps with feathered cocaine, the icelandic documentary about falcon smuggling, but i feel confident that feathered cocaine and i will cross paths again. now there's a phrase one doesn't use every day.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 what should one call a group of tugboats? don't say fleet. fleet is boring.

02 what would a system of gongs and bells in a modest private residence communicate?

03 how do you feel about seinfeld?

04 should seeing jerry seinfeld on the street automatically make you a new yorker?

05 have you ever been to a film festival? what'd you see?

*o, to have a hummingbird family like my mum's! then again, i shudder to think of how steve would feel about hummingbirds.

**seinfeld is all over the place in my affections, but i have a consistently soft spot for "hello! i got beaned with a giant ball of oil! i'm slippery as an eel!"

03.12.10



in third grade i developed an obsession with the psychedelic furs' "heartbreak beat" video. midnight to midnight was the first album i ever bought (with change, as i recall); the disdain i caught at school for carrying around that tape with richard butler's english-white belly on the front was second only to what my best friend and i caught for choreographing a dance routine to "heartbreak beat" for the talent show.* that was right around when pretty in pink** was edited for television (so i could bootleg and sneak downstairs to watch it when my parents were asleep), and when my aunt and uncle brought over a copy of labyrinth (wait, i thought, you mean knife-thin english crooners are, like, a species?). shit was afoot in '86-'87.

that ecstatic saxophone riff came rolling out of the speakers this morning when i played ipod i ching to figure out what to wear, which is why i'm at the office in skinny black jeans, motorcycle boots, and a questionable black lace shirt. heady stuff, that grainy old MTV.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 have you ever been in a talent show? what was your act?

02 if you were/are a music video watcher, do you have a "heartbreak beat" analog?

03 have you ever let dressing room muzak talk you into or out of a clothing purchase?

*we didn't even make it past tryouts; robin benway shellacked us when she lip synced to the jets' "crush on you." that was fair, as i danced about as well then as i do now.

**which, if this month's vanity fair feature is to be trusted, had something to do with our local radio:

[Molly] Ringwald, for her part, found common ground with [John] Hughes in their shared taste for British-import pop. A California girl, she gushed to Hughes about the postpunk and New Wave music that she heard on KROQ, the Anglophilic L.A. station to which she was devoted. Pretty in Pink, she says, was written for her after she played Hughes the Psychedelic Furs song of that title.

say what you will about simple minds and "don't you (forget about me)," but for my money, pretty in pink and its soundtrack are the best of the brat pack.

01.12.10

THUNDERTOME: ROUND 2

SURVIVOR: the simple art of murder (raymond chandler)*
CHALLENGER: why buffy matters: the art of buffy the vampire slayer (rhonda wilcox)

it became apparent over the weekend that rhonda wilcox's why buffy matters, not jonathan lethem's chronic city, would be bringing the pain to chandler; WBM was my subway book, and i spent a hell of a lot of time on the subway (chronic city, a hardcover, is my nightstand book, and i also spent a hell of a lot of time sleeping). as i thought about how rhonda versus ray would unfold, i realized that i've been rooting for the lady for some time now. chandler champions the detective story like, well, a champ; i re-eally wanted professor wilcox to throw a few of those punches for buffy the vampire slayer in her essay collection. buffy the television series has been close to my heart since my freshman year of college, when my hippie roommate's dad called from vermont and insisted we find a set and watch this thing about high school and the undead;** it's one of the scariest ("hush"), funniest ("once more, with feeling"), most moving ("the body") things ever to happen to network television. affection biases me, of course. does it bias wilcox? as one critic noted in a rather scathing review,

One thing that doing graduate school work on Star Trek taught me is that while academia had given me a new and powerful vocabulary to discuss television, and enabled me to put the smackdown on people who disagreed with my analysis much more effectively because a lot of people are intimidated by academic-sounding phrases, it didn't particularly make me a better critic of shows or movies of which I am a fan.

that's a bit harsh; enthusiasm and a critical eye don't have to be mutually exclusive. some of my favorite critics are tough lovers, if you will. i do, however, think wilcox is unconsciously preaching to the converted; though she addresses her introduction to both pre- and post-buffy readers,*** she doesn't always show her work. i love, for example, a riff spawned by her discussion of riley (buffy's milquetoast mid-series love interest) as virgil's aeneas:

At this point I can't resist indulging in a brief digression. The other two major Greco-Roman epics [re: the Aeneid] are, of course, the Iliad and the Odyssey; their heroes are Achilles and Odysseus, respectively. Aeneas, Achilles, and Odysseus certainly represent three very different types of hero. And it seems to me that they correlate to the three main romantic interests in Buffy's life. Achilles, who sulks and broods in his tent, is an extraordinarily powerful warrior who sometimes fights for the right and sometimes does not, and gloomily ponders his own curious form of immortality--Achilles is of course Angel. Odysseus, who has a wonderful facility with language, who is a trickster in both word and deed, who is a great fighter but does not seem to take that as his defining characteristic, who enjoys having sex and is more or less kind to the various women he encounters but is basically a one-woman man, who actually enjoys hanging out with and fighting alongside the goddess of defensive warfare (Athena) - Odysseus, my favorite, is Spike.

do i love it because i'm pro-spuffy (that is, spike plus buffy; spuffy's web presence is a frightening thing) or because she makes a good point? at the end of the day, wilcox has done some fine work (in "pain as bright as steel," on the operation of joseph campbell's monomyth in buffy) and some not-so-fine work (did the world need "when harry met buffy," on "buffy summers, harry potter, and heroism"?). if you're already a fan, she'll drive you to rearrange your netflix queue (or drive you to your DVD collection, if you're that type). if you're not, she'll...hmm. i will tell you what my friend george thinks of buffy as art if i can trap him under something heavy and force him to read it.

VICTOR: chandler. though the audience was with wilcox, ray (the critic) has ice water in his veins.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 are you a buffy fan?

02 if so, who's your favorite of the love interests? do you buy wilcox's parallels?

03 if not, what's wrong with why not?

04 have you ever written an academic paper about television? (full disclosure: i wrote a freshman civ essay on odysseus and james t. kirk. let us draw the curtain of feigned forgetfulness around my TA's response.)

05 what do you consider the scariest, funniest, or most moving things on television, network or otherwise?

*previous round here.

**the writers' treatment of buffy's cataclysmic breakup in season 2 was especially resonant for me, though in retrospect anyanka the vengeance demon and i had more in common than angelus the once-again-evil vampire and my poor ex ever did.

*** "I hope you will read the succeeding chapters and find it easier to believe that television can be art - and that you will then begin (if you have not already done so) to watch Buffy."

11.02.09

when i was a wee lass, we didn't mess around on halloween: my mother has an art degree from stanford, and she put it to good use in service of the holiday and our whims. each of our costumes was completely handmade,* and many of them were so well received that they were re-used by friends and neighbors over the next few trick-or-treating seasons (artichoke costume of the late '80s, i salute you). she still has a hand-feathered bird costume she made when my sister was a toddler, and it still drops jaws. said sister has her own art degree now (and is plugging away at costume design in grad school); the family tradition of bringing it each october has survived and gotten ever more feisty over the years.**

...which worried me when i decided to be the log lady. last year's bowie costume didn't involve a lot of sewing, but it called for enthusiastic face-painting; i got my effort in, after a fashion. i did some fancy ebaying to find a proper sweater coat and wig, but the former ended up being too big (the log lady is frumpy, but she isn't portly) and the latter arrived from hong kong...today, actually; getting a sweater from old navy and turning another wig into a bob (lauren: "hey, would you wear this while i chop it up?" joe: "no!") hardly seemed like a proper tribute to the fam. so (in the convenient absence of ponderosa pine) i made my log.



like most of the soft pieces i've built, it's primarily felt; this time i sprang for decent wool felt rather than the crappy stuff from the local art store, as i knew i'd be detailing the hell out of the bark (it will be a long time before i applique again) and i wanted it to retain its shape (and be washable, which turned out to be important, as i carried it around all night at a bar).



inspired by an extremely timely copy of jenny hart's embroidered effects,*** i tried my hand at some simple rings for the cut edges of the log and branches; given that it's the first time i've ever embroidered, i'm pretty happy with how it came out.



(that's stuffing sneaking out around the stitches; i sort of forgot to do the detailing before i constructed and stuffed the log.)

i also had a go at one of lovely amanda's favorite pastimes and spent a lunch break in central park gathering acorns and caps. i hot-glued a pair back together (you know it's craft if you melt glue), convinced them to stick to a pair of leaves i cut from log-scraps, and glued all of that to a safety pin. boom! brooch.



(you can see a bit of glue behind the caps, but that's a little cobweb rather than glue in the front. sometimes it's important to wear cobwebs.)

my log and i had a lovely time on saturday; a few people thought i was a tree-hugger and a few more thought i was carrying a giant cigarette (?), but the occasional twin peaks fan's happy shrieking was more than enough. log on, internets.

*which was especially impressive when i chose to be, say a telephone receiver, or autumn. you were patient, ma.

**my dad's side has its own techie subspecies of enthusiasts: for their semiannual halloween party this year, my godparents made a dvd invitation complete with easter eggs.

***jenny hart is my crafting idol; i've seen her at events in the city for years now, and i'm still too starstruck to roll up and say hello.