01.14.08

twelve things, continued-continued-continued:

07 from the new york times's city room blog, mayor bloomberg and the cheez-its:

On Wednesday, Newsday and its sister publication amNewYork published an article noting that a photo of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in Wired Magazine shows the mayor evidently reaching for a bag of Cheez-Its. The snack contains trans fats, which the Bloomberg administration has prohibited city restaurants from using.

so much for that potential third-party run for the presidency! as someone who is paid to think about such things, i am amused. first, obviously, the trans fat ban had/has nothing to do with packaged foodstuffs. then there was the misguided smug backlash from people who noted that cheez-its contain "zero grams" of trans fat - but didn't know that per the fda, "zero grams" means "less than 0.5 grams of fat per serving."* last and lustiest were those who simply noted that cheez-its are delicious, and right they are! i limit myself to the little bag i'm offered at the blood bank after donating platelets - they (the crackers, not the platelets) really are nutritionally disastrous - but what a bag it is. glad to see the uptick in cheez-it-related news stories.

08 didn't hear of cheezgate? perhaps you heard of our neighborhood weekend at bernie's revival.

After [Hell's Kitchen resident] Mr. [Virgilio] Cintron recently died, Mr. [James] O'Hare, 65, and another friend, David Daloia, also 65, whose last known address was in Queens, tried, without success, to cash a Social Security check of Mr. Cintron's, the police say. They realized that they needed their dead buddy's help.

So on Tuesday afternoon, the police say, they dressed Mr. Cintron's corpse, carried him down a flight of stairs and heaved his body into a computer chair with wheels. Outside, they rolled him over the uneven sidewalk, pulling the chair toward Pay-O-Matic, a check-cashing shop on Ninth Avenue.

But as the men turned the corner, trying to steady the floppy corpse, they ran into the law. At Empanada Mama,** a restaurant next door to the Pay-O-Matic, Travis L. Rapp, a detective, had sat down to lunch.

Detective Rapp looked out the window and saw the unwieldy trio. Something about the way they struggled to balance the man in the chair caught his eye.

"At this point, when they approached closer, I saw the body and I said, 'Well, this is a dead guy,' " Detective Rapp said on Wednesday in a phone briefing.

those of you who have crashed at our place might recognize that stretch of ninth avenue, as i did when i saw the news the other day - it's two blocks away, just north of our vet and the amish market. to give you a sense of our neighborhood's identity crisis, about half of the locals i know found the whole thing quite retro-charming. that darn hell's kitchen!

*"trans fat free," on the other hand, means just that. if you suspect that i've gotten stuck at the office in late-night arguments about this very issue, you are right!

**also delicious, by the by (want good local food? follow the cops). their dessert empanadas are the awesome.

01.11.08

twelve things, continued-continued:

06 o pleasing recipe! this week's design*sponge "in the kitchen with" offering, a roasted butternut squash, onion, and garlic soup from portland's amy ruppel, was quite easy to throw together and most satisfying. the version i made for us went something like this:

- 1 large butternut squash
- 1 large white onion
- 1 large head of garlic
- 1 1/2 qts vegetable broth (i used "better than boullion" vegetable base, for i am cheap)
- crème fraîche
- fresh thyme
- penzeys northwoods seasoning (a combination of salt, paprika, black pepper, thyme, rosemary, garlic, and chipotle)*
- salt and pepper
- olive oil

preheat oven to 425. cut squash in half, then scoop out and discard seeds and stringy bits. remove the skin with a sharp peeler (this was a bitch, as butternut squash is extremely sturdy and i have a right-handed peeler - if you're handy with a paring knife, that would work, too). peel some of the flesh into ribbons (i peeled about a cup's worth - this turned out to be joe's favorite part, so i'm setting aside twice as much next time) and set aside for garnish.** dice remaining squash and place in a large baking dish. toss with olive oil, salt, pepper, and seasoning to taste. place on bottom rack of the oven. rough chop onion and place in a second baking dish; toss with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and place in oven above the squash. lop off the top of the garlic, place it in a nest of foil, drizzle it with olive oil, and wrap it up; place in oven beside the onion. roast squash, onion, and garlic for...about 45 minutes (amy was vague on this, but that's how long it took in our oven), or until tips of onion are slightly brown and squash is tender. scrape squash and onion (and now-flavorful olive oil from the dishes) into a large soup pot; remove garlic from oven and set aside to cool for a few minutes. squeeze cooled garlic directly into soup pot (i used a 4 qt one and had plenty of room), add stock, then puree with stick blender*** until smooth. warm soup over medium heat for a few minutes, then serve with a spoonful of crème fraîche, a smattering of the browned squash ribbons, and the leaves from a few springs of thyme. serves...3? as a second/main course.

*having this on hand was a lucky break; i picked some up the last time i visited penzeys at grand central station because my friend jacob had recommended it. smart man, that jacob.

**20 minutes or so before your roasting is done, toss these babies in some olive oil, spread them on a sheet of foil, and roast them at 425 in the toaster oven until they're curled and brown at the edges. amy puts them in the oven with the onion, garlic, and squash, but i liked how close they were to the heating element in the toaster. also, i'm not sly enough to handle roasting four things in the same general area without, say, maiming a cat.

***for my money, the stick blender is the single greatest kitchen gadget of all time.

01.08.08

twelve things, continued:

04 i've finally found a DVD that stumps both blockbuster and netflix, and naturally it's something i need to see right away. in the course of researching annette funicello beach party movies yesterday (for work), i was introduced to the seventh and final one: the ghost in the invisible bikini ("When a pretty ghoul trades in her bed sheet for a bikini!").* boris karloff as a ghost (not, presumably, the titular one) and nancy sinatra as, um, "vicki" are enough to sell me on the thing, but basil rathbone (!) is the villain; i love actors who played sherlock holmes more than, um, john edwards loves shitting on hillary clinton.

05 i haven't made up my mind about yesterday's weepy? hillary episode. it did look kind of staged, honestly, but she's had a hell of a week: iowa (and the news outlets' coverage of iowa, especially the questionable enthusiasm at her afterparty) was embarrassing, and i felt for her when she lost her temper at edwards in the debate. i do know that i love, to get a bit meta, commenters' dorky responses to salon blogger rebecca traister's response to john edwards's response to the hillary episode. here's traister:

Edwards, speaking to reporters in Laconia, N.H., later in the day, took advantage of Clinton's emotional display to helpfully point out, "I think what we need in a commander-in-chief is strength and resolve, and presidential campaigns are tough business, but being president of the United States is also tough business."

Hey, John Edwards! What an incredibly retro-crappy, desperate, sad thing to say! Congratulations on winning Broadsheet's first-ever daily award for Orc-like incivility!

and here are some of my favorite comments on traister:

Here's an award for you, Traister - you win my Lobelia Sackville-Baggins Award of the Year, for pettiness, mean-spirited finger-pointing, and overreaction to the point of inanity.

History is written by the winners. Orcs have been besmirched by elves, men, and hobbits for too long, and it's time for progressives like ourselves to stand up to this sort of ignorant, Second Age bigotry.

That picture comparison was just nasty. Shelob-like, if we're using Middle-Earthian metaphors.

in related news, jen linked to an amusing breakdown of the gop primary field in buffy villains. it's good, though i agree with the commenter who noted that rudy giuliani is one of the gentlemen ("hush"), not angelus.

*which is appropriate, i think. when offering variations on a teen sex comedy theme, throwing down a haunted house plot is the filmic equivalent of smashing one's guitar at the end of a concert. good night, cleveland!

01.07.08

i'll be closing the march issue of the magazine this week, so the epic posts to which you've become accustomed (oh hush) will have to wait until the middle-end of january. in the interim, twelve things (to be sprinkled across the next few days):

01 brace yourselves next tuesday (01.15), for i hit newsstands on page 8 of the new issue of the ladymag. it's not a large picture, but that's for the best, as i have a long and distinguished history of giving bitchface for posed photos, and no one wants giant bitchface. i managed to stay vertical on the photographer's wobbly box by popping my hip and my elbow, a la various amateur runway walkers on america's next top model, so that's my not-particularly-sassy arm erupting from the right side of my coworker's head. fashion!

02 101 in 1001: 049 get my damn wisdom tooth removed
my wisdom teeth are the yeti of the dental world: their existence has been debated for decades, as they seem to appear and disappear at will,* leaving only mysterious footprints and terrified mountain climbers in their wake. my new dentist got a rare photo of the troublesome one (so, you know, keep your eyes peeled for that on newsstands as well) and has agreed to pluck it out, which is such wonderful news that i feel like the masochist in little shop of horrors. that's fine; the prospect of not biting my own cheek is very exciting.*

03 we saw xanadu on broadway when my sister was in town (my vote was for pygmalion with claire danes or a few hours of the televised yule log at home, but i caved), and to my great surprise, it wasn't that painful - it reminded me of evil dead the musical, with roller skates standing in for the fountains of blood and glowsticks for (cough) boom sticks. the whole production came in at around ninety minutes, most of the songs were ELO's (many written for the 1980 movie, a few more brought in for padding), and we were given the aforementioned glowsticks. xanadu, you are fair-to-middling in my book. if we're going to continue adapting '80s cult movies for the stage, by the way, is it not time for labyrinth? david bowie will play himself, obviously. maybe ellen page from juno could take over for jennifer suddenly-too-cool-for-jim-henson connelly?

*do any of you have less than four wisdom teeth? i have but two on the left; something to do with being a lefty, perhaps? pseudoscience!

01.03.08

i is risen! i haven't died for anyone's sins and been reborn, or even really recovered from recent seasonal festivities, but i've been back at work for two days and am attempting to post, and that's something. apologies to those of you who continue to expect phone calls and messages from my sorry ass; what with the driving all over arizona with the in-laws and and the crawling all over new york city with my little sister and her boyfriend - and the running all over the damn place at the gym! nineteen times since quitting smoking! - i've been busy.

i've never been a big fan of the when harry met sally (or 200 cigarettes, or insert-movie-with-splashy-manhattan-party-here) approach to new year's eve. for one thing, the missus despises ritualized public displays of affection, and kissing him at midnight is like kissing your twelve-year-old son goodbye when you drop him off at junior high. for another, the nonsense in times square has gotten so overblown that streets are blocked off (in the afternoon!) as far west as eighth avenue and as far north as...something north of us in the 50s. i was too annoyed by having to prove my residence just to come back home from the grocery store to venture far beyond the door after dark. we went to a wee party at our friends' new apartment in brooklyn heights (a thousand square feet! we must leave manhattan posthaste!), gathered around the TV for a minute or two on either side of the ball drop, and streamed up to the roof for distant fireworks. the night's real and unexpected treat, for me at least: an unearthly garland of sounds that seemed to come from warehouses a mile away and lasted for twenty minutes after twelve. some were deep and mournful, like organ music, electric whalesong; others were higher and more insistent, like train whistles or coyotes. no oboe, george insisted, though i definitely heard oboe. he noted that it was awesome, and i agreed.

and how did you spend the evening?

12.24.07



season's greetings from hell's kitchen!

12.22.07

101 in 1001: 086 tour arizona mining towns with joe [completed december '07]



the missus and i really agonized over this one. he offered several times to detour through another town (prescott, which rhymes with triscuit, not ascot) in order to satisfy the plural part of the list item, but we were more interested in getting back to phoenix in time to have a leisurely dinner at the tee pee* than i was in completing the task as literally as possible. i have visited more than one arizona mining town - we buzzed past globe a few years ago - but that was before my 101 in 1001 adventures began. i can but hope that posterity will exonerate me.

we stayed in a haunted hotel and were in fact disturbed in the night: the utter absence of sound and the hot breath of the radiator kept both of us up until about six in the morning. i hate to be one of those city slickers who can't sleep without the white noise of traffic and police sirens, a la john cusack's character in midnight in the garden of good and evil, but so i am.

jerome is now an artists' colony rather than a mining town (for the most part - there was one active site down the mountain), and the locals have realized the value of the town's picturesque decrepitude; while a few buildings (like our hotel) have been restored and maintained, just as many have been allowed to tumble apart in extremely attractive ways. i wish our friend jodie had been along for the trip: i got some fair-to-middling photos as we strolled around (the full set is here), but pros like her must get amazing stuff. visit jerome, internets! i enjoyed myself there much more than i did in sedona the next day, crystal vortices and possibility-of-running-into-axl-rose or no. how about you - visited anything sexy lately?

*gratuitous side note: my sister-in-law and i ordered the presidential special, which is what george w. bush ate when he visited the place on a campaign stop in '04. unusually, he made an excellent choice.

12.20.07

when i logged in to check my alumni e-mail a few days ago, i learned that diane wood middlebrook, a former professor of mine, passed away last weekend. she's come up in conversation several times since then, and though many, many people can speak more eloquently and personally of her than i can, it can't hurt to say a little more.

DWM, as she called herself, lived two blocks above us on green street in san francisco, in a gorgeous art deco building that looked like a cross between a cruise ship and a wedding cake. when i composed notes to her - to ask her if she'd be a professional reference (of course, she remembered me well, and she wished me luck), to ask her if she'd be an academic reference (yes, and i really was a good writer), and when i was bold enough, to ask her to coffee (she was partial to peet's, and she hoped i wouldn't mind waiting until the publication crunch for her husband was over) - i was sure she could feel my nerves jangling halfway down the hill. she was extremely kind, but she was also extremely intimidating: she was the first woman i got to know who truly kicked ass in the field i hoped to enter. she wasted no time: she told us (in english 187, plath and hughes, my senior year) that she started working at 4 am every morning, and kept a neon green background on her computer screen to shock her brain awake. she ran our little class like a boardroom, and by the end of the quarter she had all of us speaking quickly and confidently, like she did. when she learned that most of us hadn't yet read the waste land, she had a new copy for each of us (purchased herself) ready at our next meeting. she shocked me back into loving my work as it was about to end, and my papers for her just before i graduated were easily the best i wrote at college. no big surprise there: i love confessional poetry, and i wanted badly to impress her. for the last one, on ted hughes and birthday letters, i even spent an hour dorking out on cover art (in retrospect, it was pretty obviously my temporarily-rehabilitated-slacker's equivalent of a thesis).

she was funny, and frank, and quite salty. when i got my own fangirl copy of gin considered as a demon, her book of poetry, her gentle tone shocked me - between hughes and plath, i'd been sure she would sound like plath. i fantasized for three years about befriending her, about getting the conspirator's wink she wrote about in her poem about the white horse tavern here in new york. we moved east before she came back from london after finishing her husband, though, and my crush got lost as joe and i reshuffled our lives.

she was a remarkable woman, and i highly recommend getting to know her work. those of you who knew her, even as little as i did, know how lucky you were. as i do.

12.15.07 [arizona]



greetings from flavor country! after a six-hour flight sandwiched between two screaming babies and a night in a generic phoenix hotel room that was nicer than our apartment in almost every way, we've settled in for some long form loafing at joe's parents' place. this image is one of the reasons i will not be driving while we're out here; i have no interest in being the second asshole in an SUV to be swept downstream this season (it's only a few feet deep right now, but my fording experience begins and ends with the oregon trail for the apple IIe). there's little reason for anyone to drive, really - we've already taken our traditional tour of payson's Thrift Stores of the Damned and wal-mart (where i got the hairy eyeball for honking the hoochie mama elk call and learned that "wal-mart deleted [?] darts").* instead there will be reading (i'm halfway through philip roth's american pastoral), tipsy scrabbling, and NO smoking (three weeks, bitches!). quality time in the middle of nowhere, she has a certain charm - though it would be nice to find some darts. how's the seasonal nonsense in your neck of the woods?

*i wasn't particularly excited about giving wal-mart money anyway, so that was fine.

12.11.07

101 in 1001: 010 attend a taping of (jon stewart's) the daily show

Dear Daily Show Audience Members,

Due to a writers strike, “The Daily Show” taping on Wednesday December 12th, 2007 has been cancelled. Unfortunately, we have no additional information as to when this strike will end. Your cancelled show tickets will NOT be automatically rescheduled, you will have to start the process again. If you would like to attend a future taping of the show, please reserve tickets on our website at www.thedailyshow.com. Since we have no direct control over the strike, we cannot guarantee that the show will actually tape on the new date that you select. Of course, we are all hoping for a speedy resolution to the labor dispute.

i reserved those tickets back in june, man! i don't mean to whinge - being a thwarted daily show audience member is a lot better than being a daily show staffer right now, to be sure, and we're flying out west tomorrow anyway* - but that sucks.

out west, yes yes: joe's parents were going to be here in manhattan for the week surrounding christmas, but plans mutated, and we're heading out to arizona instead. speaking of 101 in 1001 items, i have high hopes for 086 (tour arizona mining towns with joe). expect sexy photos of frontier decrepitude! and please don't be put out if your annual "season's greetings from new york!" card has a phoenix postmark - until, oh, fifteen minutes ago, i've been up to my eyebrows in the february issue of the ladymag. it's been extremely unpleasant.

at the extremely pleasant end of the spectrum, louis menaud's "woke up this morning" (from last week's new yorker) yielded several of the most satisfying phrases i've read since...well, since the last time i read fitzgerald or wilde. a few of my favorites:

The impulse to keep a diary is to actual diaries as the impulse to go on a diet is to actual slimness. Most of us do wish that we were slim diarists.

[...]

At least one person has read the entire “Journals: 1952-2000,” by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (Penguin; $40), from start to finish, and this person can report that the work yields the exact degree of pleasure that can be derived from standing on a moving sidewalk: it’s painless, you don’t want it to stop, and there is not a single surprise in it.

the whole feature is great, both in little bites like those and because of menaud's larger points about what makes someone a great diarist (warhol was, reagan wasn't). it made me want to be a diarist, or to have a diligent and affectionate editor who could unpack my writing (i should be able to do that for myself, of course). read, internets, read! if you yourself have a diary, and/or a blog, consider what menaud calls the id/ego/superego theories** of diary-keeping: do you agree with any of them?

*we planned the trip after the strikers settled in for the long haul.

**as follows:

Writing is onerous (especially with an ultra-thin pencil)—writing feels like work because it is work—and, day by day, life is pretty routine, repetitive, and, we should face it, boring. So why do a few keep diaries, when diary-keeping is, for many, too much?

Three theories immediately suggest themselves. They are theories of the ego, the id, and the superego (and what is left, really?). The ego theory holds that maintaining a diary demands a level of vanity and self-importance that is simply too great for most people to sustain for long periods of time. It obliges you to believe that the stuff that happened to you is worth writing down because it happened to you. This is why so many diaries are abandoned by circa January 10th: keeping this up, you quickly realize, means something worse than being insufferable to others; it means being insufferable to yourself. People find that they just can’t take themselves seriously enough to continue. They may regret this—people capable of taking themselves seriously tend to go farther in life—but they accept it and move on to other things, such as collecting stamps.

The id theory, on the other hand, states that people use diaries to record wishes and desires that they need to keep secret, and to list failures and disappointments that they cannot admit publicly have given them pain. Diary-keeping, on this account, is just neurotic, since the last thing most people want to do with their unconsummated longings and petty humiliations is to inscribe them permanently in a book. They want to forget them, and so they soon quit writing them down. Most people don’t confess; they repress.

And the superego theory, of course, is the theory that diaries are really written for the eyes of others. They are exercises in self-justification. When we describe the day’s events and our management of them, we have in mind a wise and benevolent reader who will someday see that we played, on the whole, and despite the best efforts of selfish and unworthy colleagues and relations, a creditable game with the hand we were dealt. If we speak frankly about our own missteps and shortcomings, it is only to gain this reader’s trust. We write to appease the father. People abandon their diaries when they realize that the task is hopeless.

12.07.07

i'm going to have to start a collection of favorite reactions to the golden compass (hitting theaters this very minute - why am i at work again?). what was that delicious phrase of hannah's? causin more family feuds than richard dawkins - how i love philip pullman. from today's houston chronicle, "does film compass steer kids in wrong direction?" -

"If parents see (the movie) they might think, 'What a great Christmas gift idea? [sic] Why don't I get little Johnny or Sally the trilogy?' But if that happens, then little Johnny or Sally will wake up Christmas morning to a candy-coated message of atheism," [a spokeswoman for the Catholic League] said.*

is "candy-coated message of atheism" a memoir or a garage band? can it be both?

in other news, i found a stimulating survey about which presidential candidates would put the most thought into buying holiday gifts, according to american women. the top five for each party:

31% hillary clinton
14% john edwards
11% barack obama
3% bill richardson
3% joe biden

18% rudy giuliani
13% john mccain
8% fred thompson
6% mitt romney
5% mike huckabee

having spent time with people who have received gifts from some of the above, i can say that one frontrunner sounds right and the other is intensely amusing. personally, i'd want a christmas present from dennis kucinich (2%, the poor guy).

*my favorite comment on that story: If your beliefs are so flimsy that they are swayed by a movie with a talking polar bear, you should probably stay home and shut off the electricity.

12.06.07

happy holidays and absolutely no trespassing* to you and you and you, from our management company.



i kind of enjoy the combination of goodwill and bossiness that erupts around the city in december. when joe and i were leaving our apartment last night, a cab screeched to a stop in front of our steps: "hey man," the driver yelled, "where is your coat?" we said that we were just crossing the street to get to the gym, and he nodded and zoomed away.

on the gym: to my great surprise, i've continued to go (nine times now since the quit - at this rate i might actually hit 100 visits in time to knock off 017 on my 101 in 1001 list). to my horror, i'm starting to enjoy myself a tiny bit. this breathing-hard-without-pain thing is fascinating! the new rub is that i'm not really interested in anything other than cardio: though i'm developing a moderate interest in running** and dig elliptical machines, weight machines (and free weights) are deadly boring. can one get ridiculously fit without them?

*and no hot showering, apparently. they've been real creeps about consistent heating thus far this season - trying to freeze the sweet old ladies out of the building, i'd imagine.

**on a treadmill, mind you. i'm wa-ay too self-conscious to run in public.