The Gaze

What I'm Reading Now: Twilight

2008-08-22T23:18:00.000-07:00

I have this theory that there are two kinds of people in this world, or at least the Victorian novel-reading portion of it: those who love Emily Bronte, and those who love Charlotte. I am most definitely a Charlotte kind of girl. I can get behind the madwoman in the attic. But "Wuthering Heights"--good lord! Even as a seasoned literature grad student, I can't help snickering when I get to the scene where Cathy is so upset about being separated from Heathcliff that she starts foaming at the mouth. Or when Heathcliff tries to dig up Cathy's coffin and lie with her dead, decomposing body. I know it's supposed to show the depth and breadth of their emotions, which are so defiant of the rationalized strictures and stratifications of British society, but still. It's also very silly.

Anyway. I imagine that Stephenie Meyer, and most of her readers, are Emily Bronte girls. "Twilight," clocking in at just under 500 pages, could have been whittled down to a probably less than half that length if a judicious editor had pruned out the excess of gloriously agonized eyes and grimaces and long, meaningful glances that are exchanged between the novel's heroine, Bella Swan (yes, yes. I know) and her object of love, Edward Cullen. Every description of the perfect Edward simply drips with purple prose: he has an "incandescent chest," "scintillating arms," "glistening pale lavender lids." Excess (and particularly emotional excess) seems to be the book's major selling point, which would be fine if it weren't for the fact that--thematically anyway--the novel seems to be about restraint.

"Twilight" is a love story between a girl and a vampire: they love each other, but there is also a part of him that wants to kill her and drink her blood. This is actually a very interesting topic for a novel, but "Twilight" is not as compelling as its premise would suggest. For one thing, there is no tension on Bella's part. While Edward has to struggle with his instincts to be with Bella, Bella doesn't really seem to mind if Edward kills her. She doesn't seem particularly attached to her human community, so dying or being turned into a blood-sucking agent of death and destruction in order to be with the man she loves seems like an okay option.

For another thing, it's not very subversive. Vampire novels usually belong to the underground world of pulps, Anne Rice, and comic books: there's usually something sexy or dirty or apocalyptic about them, which translates to at very least a desire to turn contemporary society on its head. There is none of this in "Twilight." There is no cultural critique. At best, its target is a too-permissive society in which people have access to and give in to their desires all too easily, but this has been lampooned more successfully in the world of YA lit by--of all things--"Gossip Girl." At worst, "Twilight" promotes a sort of watered-down Ayn Rand-type message where we are intended to sympathize with or imaginatively project ourselves amongst an elite few who hold the power of life or death over the largely brainless, personality-less masses.

I wouldn't go as far as Alicia Valdes-Rodriguez in saying that the popularity of the "Twilight" books are indicative of a fascist turn in American society (although, granted, I've only read one book in the series, and she's read all four)--but I do think that they are representative of a complacent one, largely unwilling to rock the boat or upset the status quo. Any kind of racism that is embedded in it is reflective of the racism already existing in American society--and I do think that Valdes-Rodriguez is justified in taking Meyer to task for letting that go by without comment or critique. Because ultimately, the "Twilight" books seem to be okay with the world as it is...and I don't think either Bronte would agree.

On keeping my word(s)

2007-02-17T19:03:00.000-08:00

I just crafted this post and in defiance of my long absence Blogger ATE IT.

I am pissed. But trying again, though I'm of course now lacking the initially spontaneous well-crafted wonder. It's not my fault.

I think I promised you tales of music theft, love, and gifting.

[segue was here but now lacking]

Recently stolen for the LA-Tucson/Tucson-LA drive: Moonpools and Caterpillars, Rilo Kiley, That Dog. More recently stolen: Artichoke Heart Souffle, more Moonpools and Caterpillars, more Rilo Kiley, Regina Spektor (ok that was a gift)... I'm sure I'm forgetting more than one something.

Speaking of gifts, I also may or may not have promised the track list from a mix recently gifted. First mix I ever took really seriously in the making so yeah, it's close to me. And yes, there are various dimensions of narrative behind it but no, I don't have I the energy to provide you with anything like a story of the loves behind it (though yes I did talk to V very recently at length about such things). For now just don't mind the amusement and absurdity block just after dead center. Maybe I'll write more soon.

From December 2006

1. Get Up ……………………………………Sleater-Kinney

2. Mass Romantic ………………………..The New Pornographers

3. Down About It …………………………The Lemonheads

4. Ray Ray Rain……………………………Bettie Serveert

5. Velouria…………………………………...The Pixies

6. Fortune Teller…………………………..Sugar

7. New #1………………………………….....Bob Mould

8. Make Me Shinne………………………..Echo and the Bunnymen

9. Rainmaker………………………………..Sparklehorse

10. And She Was…………………………....Talking Heads

11. Red Right Ankle………………………...The Decemberists

12. Mission: Irresistible……………………The Rondelles

13. My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors…Moxy Fruvous

14. Sneaky Snake………………………….....Tom T. Hall

15. Cars and Parties………………………….Edith Frost

16. In the Cold, Cold Night………………....The White Stripes

17. In the Dark……………………………........Nina Simone

18. Shade and Honey………………………....Sparklehorse

19. Oh!..........................................................Sleater-Kinney

My words have been hard to come by lately but I'm working on that. The need for working is hardly an excuse.

Oh, and the boyfriend and I saw our first concert last weekend. Meant to write about that. Sparklehorse at the Fonda. I love Sparklehorse. And Henry Fonda. Maybe I'll write something. This guy wrote something and he has pictures.

Dispatch from the Desert

2006-12-29T09:32:00.000-08:00

For a while I was busy. Then for a while Blogger refused to invite me to the new interface. And I was still busy. These aren't exactly workable excuses but still these are facts. I'm alive and well in Tucson, AZ for the holidays, leaving again for LA shortly. It rained, complete with thunder and lightning, just to be sure I'd remember what I've been missing (missed the entirety of monsoon season this summer, for instance). It's crisp, cold, and beautiful--but I do love Los Angeles. First drive to and from with my sweet little ipod, so expect a best-of-the-roadtrip countdown or some such before long. For now I'll just say it's been relaxing as hell (is hell relaxing?) and a wonderful holiday--holiday spiked with wonder, including massive indulgence in Cold War spy fiction, drinks in a would-be-fallout-shelter, homemade cinnamon rolls, research in dad's private archive of MacGyver episodes, and adventures in arugula pesto. Among other things. Best holiday wishes to all and I'm making the not-a-resolution for the still-not-a-new-year to write you more soon.

This Week's Most Hated: Christopher Hitchens

2006-12-15T00:21:00.000-08:00

In this month’s Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens wonders why women have no sense of humor. I myself wonder why Christopher Hitchens is such an old fogy. The article itself is pretty silly and ends up relying on the kind of “well, I guess we’re just bioengineered to be like that” line of reasoning that gets journalists book deals and Harvard presidents fired. But it also uses this biologically-based argument to use as a smokescreen to cover over the actual portent of women’s humor—which, unless it is described as mere wittiness, cattiness or derivative of “men’s” humor in some obvious way—is dismissed by Hitchens as just being “terrible.” But why?

I think the really great female comedians are precisely the ones who do routines where men usually tend to squirm or miss the joke. Hitchens writes about the intrinsically funny nature of poop jokes and penis jokes, but he doesn’t mention the wide range of cunt jokes, the most famous of which might be that Margaret Cho routine where she runs around the stage yelling, “Hi, my name’s Gwen, and I’m here to warrrrrrsh your vagina!” over and over again. Cunt jokes told by men tend to be mean-spirited or nasty; cunt jokes told by women tend to be confrontational, and, to me anyway, really really funny. (Another one that I like is Wanda Sykes’s impersonation of a cranky stripper: she props one leg up on a chair and snarls, “LOOK AT IT!”)

Anyway. I think the real question isn’t “Why aren’t women funny?” but “Why don’t you think women are funny?” Or, possibly, “Why aren’t men, including famous journalists at major magazines, nearly as funny as they think they are?” Because while men may be wondering why we don't get the joke, we're often just snickering behind your back.

ADDED: Forksplit, the blogger who originated the term "cunt bomb," has also commented on the Hitchens article. Go read it.

Famous Plagiarists

2006-12-11T19:49:00.000-08:00

In light of the recent hubbub over Ian McEwan's misappropriation of Lucilla Andrews' memoir, No Time for Romance, in his feted novel Atonement, I thought it might behoove all of us to review some of the most notorious cases of literary larceny within recent memory. That's right, it's list time! Counterfeiters and fabulists of all stripes have been included for good measure.

* In his 2002 Slate article, penned in the aftermath of allegations that Stephen Ambrose kinda, maybe had a nasty little habit of lifting passages from fellow historians, David Plotz rattles off a list of some of the literary world's most unlikely offenders (including Martin Luther King Jr. and NPR's Nina Totenberg-- tch, and she seemed like such a nice girl), reminding us that plagiarism isn't just for the soulless. Speaking of soulless...

*The rogues' gallery of precocious, yet ethically bankrupt, journalists: the Times' Jayson Blair, The New Republic's Stephen Glass (played to squirming perfection by Hayden Christensen in the inevitable jump to big screen), and the Washington Post's Ben Domenech.

* Yes, even Bob Dylan has been sent to the Dean's office a time or two. Was it Bono who said "Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief"? Madonna nods her head in agreement.

* Chicklit wunderkind and sometime Harvard student Kaavya Visanathan takes one for the ivy team, while romance scribe Janet Dailey claims mental illness led her to gank lines from Nora Roberts (touché, Ms. Dailey, touché).

*Academics and their choler: researchers take Dan Brown to task for filching all their ideas about the real baby Jesus.

*Behold: Wikipedia, the magna mater of academic dishonesty.

*The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell meditates on a case of plagiarism involving his own work on serial killers and the Broadway play Frozen, devolves into ambivalence. Surprise, surprise.

*The Chronicle of Higher Education's Carolyn Foster Segal covers the undergraduate beat, fights the good fight.

What I'm Reading Now: Holiday Indulgence Edition

2006-12-11T09:04:00.000-08:00

“I think we need to start up a Most Hated library in one of the TA lounges,” Vivian said over brunch, tossing two books onto the table: a copy of a bodice-ripping romance novel and—wonder of wonders!—Nicole Richie’s recent roman-a-clef, The Truth About Diamonds. It’s entirely possible that I squealed with glee. I have a serious weakness for tales filled with gossip, bitchery and backstabbing—themes not necessarily limited to cheap airport romance novels, mind you: many of the great French writers, like Balzac, Colette and Proust, were absolute masters—and Nicole Richie’s book looked to deliver all that and a bag of chips, plus a sixteen-page full-color fashion photo spread of its author smack in the middle of the book.

Sure enough, it did, and Paris Hilton/Simone Westlake comes in for the lion’s share of the bitchery. Most of the snark is funny and quite witty, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Nicole Richie actually did write it herself—as opposed to hiring a ghostwriter, according to the prevailing rumors. As an author, she seems pretty aware of the ridiculousness of the club-kid lifestyle (“We were nothing if not unoriginal”) and has a few good one-liners up her sleeve, most of them at the expense of Carrie Markee (Kimberley Stewart?), who is “the kind of girl who’d get pregnant just to have an abortion to brag about” and responds to the presence of photographers and celebrity like “a dog hearing a bag of Fritos being opened somewhere in the vicinity.” Still, what doesn’t come in for a smart dose of satire is way that contemporary celebrity culture creates shallowness: the omnipresence of photographers, the constant perusal of Us magazine and celebrity weeklies, the way that appearance, and appearance only, constitutes identity. In this culture, style equates virtue—the Protestant ethic as reimagined by fashionistas. As a result, The Truth About Diamonds never ventures far below the skin-deep—at one point, the narrator Nicole and her avatar Chloe wonder “why anyone would choose to be fat and ugly”—because in the world of this novel, fat is consistently equated with moral failing. The characters who are fat are either villanous or weak, and the others must recover from being fat, either through gastric bypass surgery (DJ Ray) or dieting (Chloe). Naturally, the final, half-assed gesture at interiority largely fails.

But whatever. Nicole Richie isn’t a cultural critic, she is the culture. And as a fast beach read, The Truth About Diamonds is definitely much more entertaining than the soporific nonsense being churned out by the Steel mills (though that may just be a generational thing).

To Do in LA: Monday at The Echo

2006-12-08T15:14:00.000-08:00

Because they are relatively nice guys, I thought I would post this show flyer for our friends in A for Attack. Think Mickey Avalon meets Creation Records meets the letter Q. Crazy, I know. I'm totally going to be there.

A for Attack
Monday Dec 11, 2006
at 9:00 PM
The Echo
1822 Sunset Blvd

Jonathan Richman: Safari Sam's, Los Angeles, CA

2006-12-04T00:29:00.000-08:00

Show Review: Jonathan Richman, Safari Sam's, Los Angeles, CA
December 2, 2006

If you didn’t know any better, you might just think that Jonathan Richman is forever young. Most of his album covers over the past thirty years showcase the same wiry man-boy with spindly limbs, wide eyes, and lovable grin. His recordings are also perennially fresh: his voice, goofy and guileless as it is, never seems to age, always ringing with the same dulcet tones of naiveté. Even at his most caustic (which isn’t very), there’s usually a stray warble on hand to sweeten the bite of latent bitterness, to spin the emotional charge of his lyrics into the puppy-dog confusion of innocence rather than the jaded abrasion of experience. And though he often tells you on his records that he is "from the 60's / the time of 'Louie Louie' and 'Little Latin Lupe Lu,'" you might be a fan of Jonathan Richman for many, many years and easily fall under the misapprehension that he is, and will always be, a very sweet sort of kid. It might just be what you love most about him.

These elements which go into making the cult icon’s solo work more or less irresistible (including his preternaturally sincere references to himself in the third person- e.g. “Your pal Jonathan wants to rock. Did you hear me? I want to rock!”), mutually conspire to render his live show a bit eerie. I hadn’t seen a recent photograph of Jonathan Richman since 1998’s I’m So Confused, the last album cover upon which his picture appears. Suffice it to say, when I saw him take the stage at Safari Sam’s in Los Angeles this past weekend, I found myself experiencing a profound case of cognitive dissonance. The disembodied voice I’d known through many a late night sing-along was at long last hooked up to a three-dimensional body; however, it wasn’t the gangly kid from the album covers, but an actual grown-up: a real live fifty-something with budding wrinkles and a weathered smile. It was somehow strange to see him as a full-blown middle-aged man, a state I'm sure he's been existing in without my knowledge for a decade or so at least. The resulting confusion was in turn amplified once he started the set. His voice (absolutely stunning in its effortlessness) and distinct guitar strumming were a perfect match to the recordings of my memory. And while Richman can still shake and shimmy with the best of them (I mean he’s not, like, geriatric), the clear markers of his age juxtaposed with the pristine quality of his musical performance projected a layer of the bittersweet, not to mention the uncanny, onto the night, one that I haven’t yet fully processed.

Interestingly enough, Richman's set was mainly comprised of his more recent material (Her Mystery Not of High Heels and Eyeshadow, Not So Much to Be Loved as to Love). He did at one point unpack a version of The Modern Lovers’ classic “Pablo Picasso,” but noticeably absent were some of the old favorites from his earlier solo output: “Fender Stratocaster,” “Action Packed,” “Everyday Clothes.” They remained in the vault for the evening, perhaps suggesting that for Richman the songs aren’t necessarily as eternal as they are for his audience. I guess even the forever young have the right to pick up and move on, to close doors and clean out closets, to basically just grow older -- even if their fans would have it otherwise.

Pop Notes: Hollaback Hos

2006-12-02T17:24:00.000-08:00

Again, I'm way behind the curve on this one, but seriously. Gwen Stefani has written a song that uses "The Lonely Goatheard" as its hook. It could have been amazing, but it's just nails-on-a-chalkboard annoying.

Equally annoying, but catchier, is Fergie's "London": it's just a bit more tuneful, but it's equally incomprehensible. I dare you to listen to this once without getting the chorus stuck in your head: "How come every time you come around/My London, London Bridge wanna go down?" But seriously, wtf does that mean? Between her humps and her bridge, Fergie is on her way to becoming her very own nation-state whose chief export is skank. (Oh, SNAP!)

What I'm reading/watching now: Tell-alls.

2006-12-02T10:10:00.000-08:00

Recently, I went to see the latest installment of Michael Apted’s “Up” films, in which all of the participants are now forty-nine years old, and seem happier, cannier, and funnier than they have in the previous installments of the series. One of the brattily precocious upper-class boys (“I read the Observer and the Financial Times!”), now a snarky, well-established Tory judge with a powdered wig and gown, was skeptical that the films had any kind of value other than that of a voyeuristic entertainment, while one of the former East End girls takes Apted on, accusing him (and rightly so, I think) of manipulating their lives on camera, of trying to script out their stories and flattening them into “characters” with little relevance to their real lives. All of the interviewees come from a generation that predates reality show stardom, and it’s refreshing to be able to see people on camera who have little interest in crafting a screen persona or a public image: aside from a couple of stodgy (and therefore deeply boring) upper-class folks, they don’t seem to have prepared much for their close-up. For the most part, they are who they are. It’s a nice corrective to the celebutante culture of Los Angeles, which to me has its analogue (for those with a more literary bent) in the confessional mode of memoir, which provokes the same feeling of judgment and voyeuristic glee. Although I love reading the memoirs of the not-so-rich, not-so-famous, and deeply fucked up, there is a part of me that lifts an eyebrow at this need for self-exposure and public self-fashioning, for working out one’s demons on such a public scale. This is a criticism that doesn’t entirely apply to celebrity or statesman’s memoir: in a sense, those people are already public property. On the other hand, people like Dave Eggers, Augusten Burroughs, James Frey or, for the purposes of this review, Sean Wilsey, generally aren’t: at least until they choose to reveal themselves in all their glory.

Anyway. The pages of blurbs prefacing Sean Wilsey’s memoir Oh the Glory of it All testify to its humor and compulsive readability, and in fact it is a serious page-turner: I picked up a copy of the book one afternoon in Borders and finished it—all four hundred and seventy-nine pages of it—before I went to bed that evening. (This might be a record, even for speed-reading me.) The first half of the book is pure candy: it begins with the author’s privileged upbringing as a scion of San Francisco society, then descends into backstabbing, hair-pulling, diamond-flaunting social savagery in the Jackie Collins vein before switching gears as it continues with the author’s journey through high school loserdom in a variety of Hobbesian private schools that reads like a Harry Potter novel gone very, very wrong. Naturally, the last half of the book, where he’s redeemed by his experience at a reform-boarding school in Italy and returns to San Francisco, forgiving pretty much everyone except for his bitchy stepmother, is less compelling. This isn’t to say that this part of his life story isn’t as objectively interesting as his decline and fall, but his way of writing about it, or of presenting it, does become more dull and derivative. For example, when he describes the school that saved him, he does so by quoting about three full pages worth of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. That’s lazy and borderline plagiarism: the kind of thing that you might write in a letter to a friend (or maybe in your blog), but not in your official memoir. Compared to the first half of the book, it seems like a significant drop-off in effort, which makes me think that maybe the story of redemption isn’t the main point here. Maybe the true purpose is the “unmasking” of his evil stepmother Dede Wilsey, currently the grande dame of San Francisco society, who, innocent of his charges or not, now lurks in the mind of the non-San Francisco reading public as a diamond-studded harpy. The focus of this book, then, may not be so much about confession and redemption (the nominal purpose of such a confessional memoir?) as it is about straight-up revenge, even though Wilsey denies this as a motive. Still. If only a fraction of his stories about his stepmother are true, he certainly deserves his chance to get his own back--though even this backfires to a certain degree: the Dede Wilsey of this story is so evil, she becomes sublime. She goes from hateful to Most Hated, which is a true distinction in its own right.

Vinyl Mafia Round-Up

2006-12-02T01:24:00.000-08:00

I've been known to hate on Neal Pollack from time to time, but this recent blog entry about his son is truly hilarious. At least he's not attempting to unearth the Lester Bangs of video game criticism or, what's worse, perform a puerile close-reading of Radiohead's Kid A and the 9/11 attacks (cough, Chuck Klosterman, cough, cough).

Hell hath no fury.

2006-11-21T21:59:00.000-08:00

Sorry Liz, sorry Alanis, sorry Fiona; Beyoncé has created the best betrayed-woman song ever, and that is Ring the Alarm. Now I realize that this is mostly a matter of taste, as each hell-hath-no-fury song has its points, but while I find Liz Phair, Alanis Morrissette and Fiona Apple a little self-involved and pouty, Beyoncé is just straight-up crazy. She's scary angry in the way that perfectionists crack like a mirror when they are finally pushed too far. The rage is so pure it’s almost sublime: this is Medea-grade shit. Jay-Z better watch himself.

Update: The Nation hearts Beyonce for delivering a "unique version of black female dissent in pop and R&B music" while Kelefa Sanneh thinks that the single "Irreplaceable," also on the B'day album, is the best pop song of the year (possible of all time).

Pancakes for all!

2006-11-19T12:20:00.000-08:00

So after nosing around the Pancake Mountain website (the children's program / project which featured the Evens video) and Youtube for an hour this morning, I finally hit the jackpot. Behold: Craig Wedron! And dancing babies!

For your very own Pancake Mountain DVDs, visit Amazon.

Vowel Movement: No, I didn't make up that title. They did.

2006-11-18T23:32:00.000-08:00

Whenever I think of Ian MacKaye he's usually kind of angry. He's also wearing a rather dour skullcap and, more than likely, wagging his finger. Sometimes he's hollering, sometimes he's screaming, sometimes he's simply sulking. He's generally not laughing. He is rarely, if ever, winsome.

If this is also your perception of Mr. McKaye (he of Minor Threat, Fugazi, Dischord fame), then do I have a treat for you. I'm sure most have heard about his warmly-reviewed project with Amy Farina (The Evens), but have you actually seen the video which preceded their two latest albums? It features twee vocal harmonies and several floating babies. It borders on frolicsome at times and therefore is worth multiple viewings. Click the box below for the inevitable mindfuck.

Disclosure: I believe the video (praise YouTube) was put together by The Evens for a DC-area children's project and is generally not performed live- it also doesn't appear on either of their current releases. But still. If you haven't already, you must see it. It kinda rules.

A Tale of Two Queens

2006-10-23T10:46:00.000-07:00

Before I embarked on yesterday’s Queen-themed movie double feature, I knew that although Stephen Frears’s Queen seemed like it would interesting, the one that I was really looking forward to was Sofia Coppola’s confection, Marie Antoinette. I embraced the idea of catchy anachronism (Moulin Rouge is one of my favorite movies ever), high school-esque bitchiness, and lots of pretty clothes. Certainly, Marie Antoinette delivered, but all in all it wasn’t everything I hoped it would be. There are a couple of really great montages—the shopping scene and all of the party scenes—but there’s a lot of ambiguity here, and it doesn’t seem purposeful so much as it seems like the director wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to say. It’s too silly to be serious and too serious to be the frothy teen-movie-in-Versailles that I thought it was going to be. It’s an ambiguity that extends to the film’s portrayal of the queen and her court: on the one hand, Kirsten Dunst’s Marie Antoinette is very likable, doesn’t come across as spoiled so much as clueless, and her parties look like a lot of fun. On the other hand, the movie seems to mock them, too, especially in the scenes at the Petit Trianon, where her friends coo that they “love the country!” while wrinkling their noses at the chickens and geese that strew their path. Being the nerd that I am, the scene that best illustrated this puzzing ambiguity for me was the one where Marie is sitting in the grass and reading Rousseau to her bored friends with utter earnestness, while the camera lingers on the beautiful landscape. It’s Rousseau’s philosophies and his praise of the “natural state” that forms, in part, the philosophical underpinning of the revolution that was ultimately going to end her life (and her friends’ lives) in a really bloody, nasty, brutal way; but to them it’s just the ‘it’ book of the moment, sort of like trust fund hipsters reading Chuck Palahniuk. I have absolutely no idea what the film wants us to make of this. Does it want us to think that these women are just stupid? Or that beauty and terror are flip sides of the same coin? Or, like Marie herself, did it just throw in the literary reference in order to look fashionably “deep”? I sort of suspect the latter.

But it’s a fun enough movie; my gripes may be mostly due to the way Marie Antoinette paled to The Queen in comparison. If you are a poor graduate student and only have enough money to go to see one more movie this month, go see this one. Go see it now! It is so, so, so, soooo good. Helen Mirren is amazing: they’re probably engraving her name on the Best Actress Oscar as you read this. But it’s also a very well-written, and apparently well-researched, script; and the supporting actors are also uniformly terrific (I’d never seen any of them except the guy who plays Prince Philip). Perhaps it’s because I’m not British, and perhaps it’s because my watered-down Japanese upbringing has instilled me with an admiration for stoicism (though I can hardly claim to be a stoic myself), but I really liked this portrayal of the Queen: it shows her as witty, tough, and stubborn—rather like the movie as a whole. It makes you feel for the queen, but never descends into sentimentalism; nor does it minimize or mock the orgy of grief following Princess Di’s death. There are no villains here, just a lot of human, bungling people. All around, it struck me as being an amazingly fair-minded movie: and even the tiniest little details (like the toys littering the ground and untidy bookshelves at 10 Downing, the army of dogs running around the Palace—btw, I now desperately want a Welsh Corgi) are in place here.

Wednesday Night TV: PR (Good riddance), Lost (What?)

2006-10-19T00:12:00.000-07:00

So tonight was the season finale of Project Runway, to which I say: meh. This show has jumped the shark. By this season, it’s all so professionalized: all of the collections were good, but they were so slick that I stopped caring who won. Any one of them could have won and it would have been fine with me. I just wasn’t as invested as I was in Seasons 1 or 2. Whatever. Yawn.

Lost, on the other hand, still has my fan-like adoration. Last night’s episode went to crazytown, but I have a high tolerance for the random weirdness that this show pulls out every once in a while, especially when they trot out the angry polar bears. I’m particularly pleased that they appeared in tonight’s episode, because they were clearly on my mind all day. For example, here’s a picture of my notes from seminar today:

See what I mean?

Anyway, the questions I still have: 1) Was that “Zeke” (bearded Walt-kidnapper) on John Locke’s hippie commune? 2) Who are those random crash survivors who suddenly appeared when Hurley got back to the camp, and why haven’t we seen them before ever? 3) Why did the hatch explosion rip off all of Desmond’s clothes and leave him running around naked for half of the episode? Was he mauled by a lusty polar bear? Or did the Island look into the secret souls of its viewers and figure out that that’s what we wanted it to do?

At any rate, I’m glad that Locke’s back and is a bit of a badass again, hunting and tracking and blowtorching polar bears. Hooray for Lost!

Food Porn Dispatch: Not Your Atkins Dinner But...

2006-10-15T22:01:00.000-07:00

I told myself I would clean the kitchen tonight. Instead I decided to put it to use but just for the record, I did wash my dishes.

Apparently when left to my own devices alone in my apartment for days I start to compulsively cook? Who knows. I was feeling a bit of a cold coming on Friday so nothing altogether spectacular turned up on the menu but do let me tell you my
sinuses thank me for various concoctions of red-pepper-flake-spiced ginger garlic vegetable soup. That one barely needs a recipe--sautee aromatics of choice in butter or olive oil, give a quick turn to veggies that could use softening (carrots, peppers, mushrooms), add broth of choice, simmer and spice, wilt in greens, add noodles, add tofu, spice the hell out of it, serve. Best with girls night after.

But oh tonight alone--

I've become a huge fan of it's-not-a-recipe-it's-a-method cooking of late. Translation: I've become a huge fan of experimenting enough to keep things interesting and/or use up vegetables or pantry offerings. Today I decided it was time to harvest a bunch of the basil happily growing out on the balcony before it started to wilt away its life. Pesto! said I to myself. Sure I'd never made pesto but how hard could it be? My apologies for the fact that sleuthing my way through various cookbooks and epicurious and other online sources + a predilection for using up what I had in the fridge / on the balcony = startling lack of concern for accurate or repeatable measurements.

Fettucini with Veggies and Pesto Sauce

Pesto--

1 clove garlic
1/2 shallot
about 1 C fresh basil
handful of flat leaf parsley
zest and juice of 1 lemon
about 1/4 C pine nuts, lightly toasted
dash each salt and pepper
around 1/4 C crumbled goat cheese
light sprinkle of parmesan
around 1/3 C extra virgin olive oil

Combine all but the oil in blender or food processor. To make sure everything got mixed in thoroughly, I started with the garlic and shallot to be sure they got chopped, then basil, then slowly whatever else. Then stream olive oil for the right consistency. The shallot added a bit of a bite and I always love them with pasta but you could leave that out. The end result before cheese (and I didn't have much in the fridge, went with goat instead of the usual parmesan but damn was that good) was pretty lemony so be warned or cut the zest / go with half the juice. I liked it but I'm sure that sort of thing depends on personal taste.

Then I cooked up some fettucini, adding chunks of zucchini and some frozen greenbeans to the pasta water for the last two minutes or so, snagged a few spoonfuls of starchy water to mix into the pesto, then drained everything off. Recombined everything in the pasta pan, stirred pesto throughout, added canolini beans and topped it off with some chopped tomato and more black pepper. Beans were a must for me since there's only a little other protein and I am a monster without regular influxes of protein. Change up the veggies as you like--anything that can stand up to the heat but that you don't want too overdone. Or else you could cook up veggies separately and add them after. Mushrooms and bell peppers might not handle the quick blanch but they sure would taste good.

Then I decided that since I was still hungry after eating I needed to bake. Of course. Because I haven't learned my lesson that our oven is SHIT. In spite of the shittiness, I made orange-zest-spiked chocolate chip cookies last weekend that managed to be the hit of a very nice party.

But tonight I decided to revive an old favorite--my mother's tea cake. Quick and easy. So much less butter and sugar than a batch of cookies and so light and fluffy that I tell myself it's hardly dessert and don't even feel guilty. Plus you don't have to stand over the oven pulling trays in and out. I even walked to the grocery store at 9pm on a Sunday night just for the milk. Well that and because even if Crisco is just a nasty gooey blob of partially solidified fats it's still possible that in time the blob can go awry and believe you me what was in my cupboard was looking just a bit off. I almost substituted butter for Crisco to see what would happen but figured I couldn't exactly get away without milk so further experimentation has been delayed. It's just out of the oven and the smell alone is totally worth the 5 or so blocks alone in the dark.

Tea Cake--

1/3 C shortening
1 C sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs
1 1/2 C flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 C milk
1/2 tsp vanilla

Cream first four ingredients. Mix flour and baking powder; add alternately with milk. Add vanilla and beat thoroughly. Pour into well-greased baking pan (9x9 works well, or 8x12). Bake at 375 for 30 minutes (or 35 if you have a craptastic oven like mine--until just lightly brown on the top, when a knife comes out clean but still moist). Dust lightly with mixture of cinnamon and sugar.

Next up after I finish my pesto pasta leftovers tomorrow? Breakfast pasta for dinner!

Public Service Announcement

2006-10-10T22:18:00.000-07:00

We have not vaporized into internet ether. We have not been stranded on an undeserted island due to a plane crash due to strange numerical/mechanical/seismic/magnetic/
real/hypothetical shifts in the space-time continuum brought on by the coming of 9pm Weds nights. We have not died due to the rampages of a polar bear. We have not been stalked into submission by a noirish stranger from San Juan Capistrano. We have not plumetted from a mission bell tower.

We have started a new school year. We'll be back once we understand what that means. Or sooner.

Three words?

2006-09-28T17:55:00.000-07:00

The nagging question left over from last night’s episode of Project Runway: If you had to describe your individual style in three (non-synonymous—ahem) words, what would they be?

I think I am:
Casual
Postapocalyptic
Ninja

I think that about sums it up.

ProjRun recap tk.

Public service announcement.

2006-09-27T15:04:00.001-07:00

I have found the best blog ever, and it is called Forksplit. Be ye warned.

Fun With Fake Bands

2006-09-25T14:21:00.000-07:00

Now, don’t get the wrong idea. Grad students are very, very busy. It’s just that since we tend to be on a looser schedule than your average cubicle jockey, we occasionally have the option to do things like waste our Monday mornings getting sucked into a “Wayne’s World” rerun on HBO. Which I just did.

As I watched the show again, I realized that I knew every single joke before it was coming and laughed at it anyway. It was pure nostalgia. I had forgotten that this movie was, for good or ill, a huge part of my adolescence: the lame jokes (“A sphincter says what?”), the rocking out to Queen in the car, Garth’s “foxy lady” dance, and of course Tia Carrere playing a badass rock chick fronting the fictional band Crucial Taunt. Their cover of “Ballroom Blitz” got stuck in my head, and I decided that they really weren’t so bad, as far as fake bands go. The listmaking impulse grew strong, and so here, in descending order, are my favorite fake bands of all time.

5. Fuck You Yankee Bluejeans. In Clerks, this is the metal band that Silent Bob’s Russian cousin plays for. The one song that he sings in the film goes something like “I want to love you like a truck, Berserker/Would you like to making fuck, Berserker.”

4. Three Times One Minus One. A duo featuring Pootie T. and Wolfgang Amadeus Thelonius Van Funkenmeister the nineteenth (actually David Cross and Bob Odenkirk). They’re a white R&B duo whose first hit, “Ewww Girl Ewww,” appeared on their sketch comedy program Mr. Show—but their full-length video was featured in the movie Run Ronnie Run. There really are no words to describe its bizarrerie, so I’ve included it for your YouTube viewing pleasure below.

3. The aforementioned Crucial Taunt from Wayne’s World. One of the only major fake bands to feature a female lead singer, and it’s true: she wails. I have to say that I kind of love the band name, too. It has all the right vowel sounds.

2. driveSHAFT from Lost. This is the band that Charlie, the ex-hobbit and -heroin addict, used to play the bass for. They’re supposed to be loosely based on Oasis, but their radio hit, “You All Everybody,” doesn’t sound all that Oasian. It is pretty catchy, though, especially after you’ve been glued to your TV watching 10 episodes of the show back-to-back, at least three of which prominently feature the hook to the song. Again, YouTube comes through.

1. Spinal Tap. An obvious choice, but sometimes there’s no arguing with the conventional wisdom. There is absolutely no way you can beat little people dancing around a tiny Stonehenge. Spinal Tap is the dark lord of the fake band universe.

Book of the moment: The Historian

2006-09-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Kostova’s first novel, The Historian, debuted with the kind of buzz that only a large publishing house with several underpaid marketers on staff (in this case Little, Brown) can afford: and indeed, the book’s premise practically sells itself. Vampires! Sexy scholars! It’s like the Da Vinci Code goes highbrow!—Or at least, that must have been the plan. It certainly sucked me in: it sounded like the perfect beach book for people who spend too much time in the library. But as so often happens, the books that aim high end up falling down somewhere around the middle, and so it is with The Historian.

The Historian is about as middlebrow as it gets. The main characters—a history professor turned wealthy diplomat and his young teenage daughter—go jaunting around Europe and poking around in old libraries looking for evidence that Dracula still exists. There is something intriguingly Marxist about the idea that true immortality comes not only from literally sucking blood from the peasantry but through the preservation (and manipulation) of history, but although much of the action of the novel takes place against the backdrop of the Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War, it doesn’t really go there. Aside from a couple of manipulative Party apparatchiks, most of the characters are staunchly bourgeois, spending most of their time in hotels and cafes and exclaiming over the local cuisines. The handful of peasants that make an appearance in the book are rosy-cheeked, apparently happy despite their poverty, and live in tiny one-room cottages that resemble Thomas Kinkade paintings. There’s a curious flatness to all of the book’s characters and exotic locations: they all sound (and look) alike; landmarks aside, the descriptions of the Istanbul “local color” are practically interchangeable with those of Budapest and Sophia, and all of the narrators—the unnamed daughter, her father, his academic adviser, a fifteenth-century monk—write in the exact same style. This genteel, tea-sipping universe of academics and archivists seems almost impossible to square with the idea of Unmitigated Evil as represented by Dracula, and in fact he doesn’t even appear until near the final pages of the novel to be quickly dispatched with. Or is he? Bwah hah hah.

I do like the way that Kostova attempts to recreate the excitement of the academic “a-ha!” moment, the scholar’s equivalent of the runner’s high, where after much poring over books and bibliographies things fall into place and the idea suddenly hits. But to be perfectly honest, that “a-ha” moment was rendered much more succinctly and punchily in the Dan Brown books. The Historian takes itself way too seriously for a book about vampires, for heaven’s sake, and could probably use a bit less tea and crumpets and a lot more sex, blood, and giant bats.

Verdict?: Eh.

Fun at your neighborhood Japanese mart

2006-09-23T13:14:00.000-07:00

Went to the Nijiya Market on Sawtelle today to stock up on my stores of dried seaweed, pickled plums, and square bread. I also found these little gems on the shelves:

I like how this is clearly a chip for the hard-core corn lover. The only thing that would make it better is if it were called “Corn and Corn Alone Snack.”

Nothing too unusual about this bottle of water I snagged from the beverage case until I took a look at the label: pet bottle? Is that like a pet rock? Or is it a PET bottle, e.g. a bottle for your pets?

This one, though, is clearly my favorite. Time to get crunky, y’all.

You don't gotta eat your spinach, baby.

2006-09-22T14:19:00.000-07:00

In the comment section of that last post, our good friend Carrie rightly brought up the recent E Coli outbreak in bagged spinach. Though the FDA reports that cooking greens at high temperatures should do away with the bacteria, you should always proceed with caution. Wash your hands! Disenfect your utensils! Scrub the refrigerator! Hmm....Maybe you should just substitute a load of collard greens? Perhaps some hearty lettuce? For more information on spinach saftey, click here! Or, if you just want to read the lyrics to that Shirley Temple song, click here.

Food Porn Dispatch: Wilted Greens with Bacon

2006-09-22T12:47:00.000-07:00

I like warehouse shopping. A lot. There’s something addictive about the uniquely American experience of discount club membership, something nearly narcotic about being lulled into the dream that you’re saving money by buying lots and lots and lots of shit. Seven pound blocks of havarti cheese? And at half the price per unit? I’ll take ten, please. Pillow-sized sacks of rice, vats of crunchy peanut butter, tubs of garlic-stuffed olives. I stock them in my cabinets, my pantry, my linen closets. All in anticipation of the day I’ll come across a recipe require requiring thirteen jars of artichoke hearts and seventeen cups of mayonnaise. It could happen, you know. And if it does, my condiments and I will be ready.

There’s a catch, of course. Discount shopping always fails me when it comes to bulk perishables, always devolving into a game of beat the rot clock. What the hell do I do with a ten pound bag of spinach? It is the size of a sofa cushion and will not fit into the crisper. It sulks on the second shelf of the refrigerator, cowing the open jar of artichoke hearts into the corner alongside a desperate-looking container of sweet pickles.

So I improvise. I am creative. Spinach is, after all, relatively versatile. I freeze some of it. I make pasta. I make soup. I make things listed in cookbooks under “Florentine.” I garnish plates with tiny bunches and plop scoops of tuna salad into neat little nests. But the bag never seems to get any smaller. In the refrigerator it misbehaves. It slouches and bullies the milk jug. Eventually I decide to take action.

Wilting spinach really is a marvelous thing. It takes the piss out of even the most domineering sack of leafy produce. Saute the lot of it in a skillet of drippings, and instantly a tightly-packed colander deflates into a dense mess of greens. It becomes compact, manageable. It can fit onto a salad plate or underneath a chicken breast and is the most gorgeous concentrated color you’ve ever seen. I want to paint my whole house in it. On top you can crumble bacon and spike it with vinegar and cracked pepper. Add a chopped scallion or two, and the taste just won’t quit. You’ll start to crave it. After a couple of meals your refrigerator will be clear. Your artichokes will thank you.

Wilted Greens with Bacon

1 large mess (approx. 2 lbs) of greens (any blend of spinach, kale, beet tops, hearty lettuce, collard greens, mustard greens etc..)
5 or so pieces of bacon or 1 large chunk of fatback
2-3 cloves of garlic, minced
Kosher salt
Cracked pepper
Vinegar
A handful of chopped scallions

Carefully sort and wash your greens. Fry up the bacon and garlic in your cast-iron skillet. Once the bacon is crisp, set aside on paper towels to drain. Add greens (small bunches at a time if necessary) to the skillet, and sauté in the drippings. Once greens have wilted, remove to a large bowl. Crumble a few handfuls of the bacon on top. Throw in the scallions and toss. Season with salt and pepper. Drizzle with vinegar.