I have accidentally and only semi-willingly become a participant in a locavore experiment. The experiment does not involve local food, but it does require adherence to rules of virtue and eschewal of trashy modern pleasures and is therefore in the potentially obnoxious, self-righteous mold of a locavore experiment.
I face: no cable all summer.
This was the idea of my virtuous and budget-minded (euphemism alert) boyfriend, who doesn't watch nearly as much cable as I do. I like CNN with lunch and MSNBC in the evenings and E! and more E!! and more E!!! on the weekend nights, when the liquor ads suggest that cooler people are out partying. With my boyfriend.
Okay, he's not partying. He's out winning bread for me and the kitties. Djing. Saturday he had a particularly utilitarian gig, one at which he was forced--by a coercive requester--to play "What Is Love." You know, Baby don't hurt me/Don't hurt me/No more. He was looking for a paper bag to put on his head.
My fate was worse: an evening home alone. Normally, when he's djing and I can't come, I hang out with Joel McHale and the Kardassians and those sad clown Playboy bunnies (or, if I start to feel E!-icky, the Whiskers family).
Dear reader, it was terrifying.
I began in the network region of the dial, thinking surely those channels exist for a reason. But their raison d'être appeared to be crappy reruns. Technically I could have watched SNL, but they were rerunning the George Carlin-hosted debut and I didn't want to be home alone late at night crying; I was rather fond of George Carlin.
My next turn of logic: if I enjoy E!, a whole channel based on titillating entertainment news, maybe I should try the working man's E! I sat through a tedious half-hour about Barbara Walters' memoir on Entertainment Tonight and decided it was made for old people, but palatable nonetheless. So I doubled down and went for TMZ.
That was a mistake. Apparently I like my celebrity gossip cut with the baking soda of irony. I couldn't take the straight stuff. The rest of the night I watched nature shows on PBS, just to scrub clean. Did you know there's a cute little critter in Patagonia that's like a mix of a hamster and a deer? Did you know Patagonia isn't just a type of fleece vest? (Actually I did know that last, I'm just being cute and self-deprecating.)
I suppose if I do this every weekend all summer, I'll be purer and more adequately disturbed about global warming. And imagine all the charming species I won't know about if I watch E! instead.
I don't know, 'Keteers. Can I do this? Do I want to?
Monday, June 30, 2008
Friday, June 27, 2008
My Cat is a Narcissist, But I Love Him
My cat is a narcissist. The lives of every member of the household revolve around his needs.
It's early, we're asleep, but Paulie Walnuts is hungry and Paulie Walnuts is cranky and the campaign of biting and mrowrs will not stop until he is fed and freed to the outdoors.
Pint-sized sister Carmela is hiding away in the closet, snuggled into the winter coat I haven't worn since New York, but Paulie wants to play and does not respect hissing, so Carmela will be driven from her nest and chased around the house until the little tyrant is sated and she can slink back into the closet.
The fish only want to swim among the rocks of the aquarium, but P. Kitty wants to terrorize them and scratch the acrylic while he's at it. The chickens want to peck in peace, but Herr Vallnuts wants to stare at them until they're uncomfortable.
But when he splays his white-furred belly across the bed in a gesture that says, Love me, I'm fabulous, how can I demur? I worship, I shiatsu, I rub the sleeps from the corners of those greedy eyes. And he purrs luxuriously, because Paulie Walnuts loves life and himself, and I can't disagree.
It's early, we're asleep, but Paulie Walnuts is hungry and Paulie Walnuts is cranky and the campaign of biting and mrowrs will not stop until he is fed and freed to the outdoors.
Pint-sized sister Carmela is hiding away in the closet, snuggled into the winter coat I haven't worn since New York, but Paulie wants to play and does not respect hissing, so Carmela will be driven from her nest and chased around the house until the little tyrant is sated and she can slink back into the closet.
The fish only want to swim among the rocks of the aquarium, but P. Kitty wants to terrorize them and scratch the acrylic while he's at it. The chickens want to peck in peace, but Herr Vallnuts wants to stare at them until they're uncomfortable.
But when he splays his white-furred belly across the bed in a gesture that says, Love me, I'm fabulous, how can I demur? I worship, I shiatsu, I rub the sleeps from the corners of those greedy eyes. And he purrs luxuriously, because Paulie Walnuts loves life and himself, and I can't disagree.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Wayne and Amy: Why Not
Lil Wayne and Amy Winehouse need to get together. Not necessarily a romance, although that would be superb. A-dub likes black Jews. If the prospect of making her own is what it takes to get her away from that Fielder-Civil vampire, I'm all for it. But in a less benevolent universe, I'll settle for a meeting of the minds, a crazy-to-crazy pow-wow.
The man; the face tats.
Wayne doesn't just have face tats. He has eyelid tats. He also writes lyrics for the hip hop history books, like, I am the beast/Feed me rappers or feed me beats/I'm untame I need a leash/I'm insane I need a shrink.
These two have much in common, besides the tattoos: the freakish talent and the just plain freakishness. They both look poised to fall off the deep end at any moment, but they continue to eek out an existence nonetheless.
Amy, famously, is not fond of rehab. Well of course not! If you were a crackbrained genius, would you want to be in there with a bunch of regular people? She and Wayne need their own little rehab, away from all the functionality and the workaday stiffs.
Their disordered musical minds need each other; the rest of us can't possibly understand. If they could just be locked up together and crazy around for a while, I really think it could work. No drugs, no distractions. Just bounce ideas off each other until a new musical genre emerges. Camp for talented headcases! Lauryn Hill could be counselor.
It's a selfish plan, I admit. I want both of them to stay alive and keep my iPod fat and happy.
Generous image of Amy; cracked-out skinny bitch image (and sadly, more realistic) of Amy.
You're no doubt familiar with the five-alarm lunacy and staggering talent of the bouffant the Brits call Wino: cancels shows, smokes crack, bloodies herself variously, and sings the hell out of "Rehab."
As I wrote in a previous post (yes, I'm quoting myself, humor me):
As I wrote in a previous post (yes, I'm quoting myself, humor me):
I could never have dreamed that someone would make girl group songs with rappers and Fiona Apple-level lyrics. It's like my inner child is waving hello to my outer adult.
The man; the face tats.
Lil Wayne--bearer of the spirit of Tupac--and his equally stratospheric brand of crazy may be less familiar. Tom Breihan of the Village Voice explains far better than I ever could, describing Wayne's recent performance at Hot 97's Summer Jam:
Rasping his come-ons, Wayne rolled on the floor, humped the stage, stuck his hand down his pants... That willingness to be a complete and utter freak is a huge part of what makes Wayne's superstardom end-run such a crazy story: this tatted-up little gargoyle mess gets Chris Brown screams because he's willing to believe that he'll get those screams, and he doesn't even switch up his syrup-addled libertine persona to get them... The crowd was equal parts euphoric and baffled; I'm not sure I've ever witnessed such a pure and grand-scale WTF reaction to anything.
Wayne doesn't just have face tats. He has eyelid tats. He also writes lyrics for the hip hop history books, like, I am the beast/Feed me rappers or feed me beats/I'm untame I need a leash/I'm insane I need a shrink.
These two have much in common, besides the tattoos: the freakish talent and the just plain freakishness. They both look poised to fall off the deep end at any moment, but they continue to eek out an existence nonetheless.
Amy, famously, is not fond of rehab. Well of course not! If you were a crackbrained genius, would you want to be in there with a bunch of regular people? She and Wayne need their own little rehab, away from all the functionality and the workaday stiffs.
Their disordered musical minds need each other; the rest of us can't possibly understand. If they could just be locked up together and crazy around for a while, I really think it could work. No drugs, no distractions. Just bounce ideas off each other until a new musical genre emerges. Camp for talented headcases! Lauryn Hill could be counselor.
It's a selfish plan, I admit. I want both of them to stay alive and keep my iPod fat and happy.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
I Used to Love Homecoming
I just downloaded my fifth single off the Graduation album, so it's time to come out of denial: kudos to Kanye on this one. Hate no more, Clebbie, hate no more.
"Homecoming" is a bumpin, circusy summer track. Had it come out last year, I would have blasted it on the drive down to SoCal for my high school reunion. Chris Martin sings the chorus; it melds beautifully.
So I issue the following gripe with regrets, and only in the comfortable certainty that my plog is to Kanye as a mite is to an elephant. No, less than that.
To the gripe.
After a whole song cleverly personifying West's hometown of Chicago comes this:
If you don't know by now
I'm talkin bout Chitown
Kanye. Why.
Of course we know you're talkin bout Chitown! Anyone who didn't "know by now" should be listening to Held Back, not Graduation. Here's the evidence West offers up to the "by now" point:
The "Used to Love" reference is evident from the first line: I met this girl when I was three years old/And what I loved most she had so much soul. Ripped directly from Common, but for the fact that Common met "her" at age ten.
"I Used to Love H.E.R." is an allegory about a relationship. The young lovers start out canoodling in an NYC park and enjoy a fulfilling Afrocentric phase, but eventually she breaks for the West Coast and rolls with gangsta bitches, which is when things go foul. He says he's not sulking about her time spent with them boyz in the hood, but clearly, he is sulking. He impotently swears he'll get her back; their future looks grim.
And then at the very end--Common, you tricky devil!--we find out that he was talking about: hip hop! All along!
(In a humorous twist, some West Coast rappers took the aforementioned sulk personally and wanted to start beef with Common, who is about as un-beef-seeking a rapper as you could find.)
"Homecoming" is a bumpin, circusy summer track. Had it come out last year, I would have blasted it on the drive down to SoCal for my high school reunion. Chris Martin sings the chorus; it melds beautifully.
So I issue the following gripe with regrets, and only in the comfortable certainty that my plog is to Kanye as a mite is to an elephant. No, less than that.
To the gripe.
After a whole song cleverly personifying West's hometown of Chicago comes this:
If you don't know by now
I'm talkin bout Chitown
Kanye. Why.
Of course we know you're talkin bout Chitown! Anyone who didn't "know by now" should be listening to Held Back, not Graduation. Here's the evidence West offers up to the "by now" point:
- Song entitled "Homecoming"
- Chorus: I'm comin home again
- Only Barack Obama more famously from Chicago than Kanye West
- Personified character's name: "We(i)ndy"
- Opens with shouts of "Chi-city" (three)
The "Used to Love" reference is evident from the first line: I met this girl when I was three years old/And what I loved most she had so much soul. Ripped directly from Common, but for the fact that Common met "her" at age ten.
"I Used to Love H.E.R." is an allegory about a relationship. The young lovers start out canoodling in an NYC park and enjoy a fulfilling Afrocentric phase, but eventually she breaks for the West Coast and rolls with gangsta bitches, which is when things go foul. He says he's not sulking about her time spent with them boyz in the hood, but clearly, he is sulking. He impotently swears he'll get her back; their future looks grim.
And then at the very end--Common, you tricky devil!--we find out that he was talking about: hip hop! All along!
(In a humorous twist, some West Coast rappers took the aforementioned sulk personally and wanted to start beef with Common, who is about as un-beef-seeking a rapper as you could find.)
"I Used to Love H.E.R." stays subtle enough to make the big reveal a delicious denoument. Kanye botches the parallel, giving cringe to a song that otherwise approaches perfect.
Haterade reserves purged, think I'll go listen to it again.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Plogging Away
So glad I called it a plog. The present participle form fits right it with so many existing phrases: slogging through, plodding along, plugging away. Why...it's perfect :)
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Freakonomist vs Locavores (Double Yuck)
The gimmicky-theory kings over at Freakonomics seem to think the whole locavore thing is too gimmicky. I can't fully disagree. Despite my laying hens and my seed-grown heirloom tomatoes, I firmly believe we need a national moratorium on locavore experiments and blow-by-blow accounts thereof. Really, how much more can we stand?
Economists love using gratingly hyperrational language to totally miss the point. (I'm lookin at you, Krugman.) Dubner goes on to conclude that--surprise!--trying to do shit yourself is inefficient. We don't need, he says, "a billion locavores."
The point is not that Doing It Yourself is just so !fun! that we carry on despite market inefficiency. Pleasure is part of it, sure. With my vet bills lately, I can't kid myself that I'm saving money on eggs, yet I keep my backyard flock. I must be pleased.
But if there's one thing that annoys me more than over-hyped locavore experiments, it's cute fucking anecdotes like this one from freakonomist Stephen Dubner:
We made some ice cream at home last weekend. Someone had given one of the kids an ice cream maker a while ago and we finally got around to using it. We decided to make orange sherbet. It took a pretty long time and it didn't taste very good but the worst part was how expensive it was. We spent about $12 on heavy cream, half-and-half, orange juice, and food coloring--the only ingredient we already had was sugar--to make a quart of ice cream. For the same price, we could have
bought at least a gallon (four times the amount) of much better orange sherbet. In the end, we wound up throwing away about three-quarters of what we made. Which means we spent $12, not counting labor or electricity or capital costs (somebody bought the machine, even if we didn't) for roughly three scoops of lousy ice cream.
Economists love using gratingly hyperrational language to totally miss the point. (I'm lookin at you, Krugman.) Dubner goes on to conclude that--surprise!--trying to do shit yourself is inefficient. We don't need, he says, "a billion locavores."
But here's the thing that Dubner, along with William Alexander of The $64 Tomato, fail to grasp: they suck at making ice cream and growing tomatoes.
Hate to brag over here, but my lascivious tomatoes cost much less than their counterparts at any farmer's market or grocery store. I might be able to get anemic cardboard tomatoes for less, but then what's life for? I've done the math on my inputs of seed, soil mix, pricey organic fertilizer, water, labor. It's worth it. Monetarily.
These homegrowns represented a substantial savings, bitch.
Homespun skills get no respect. Agriculture is hard. When the $64 Tomato types try it once and fail, they throw up their hands and declare the notion of self-sufficiency absurd. It's not absurd if you know what you're doing. Learning is an upfront investment, a cost that should be amortized over a lifetime of practicing a skill.
Locavore guru Michael Pollan of course gets name-checked in the Freakonomics post. The Clebster has moved from past fanatical worship of him toward semi-disdain. Maybe he's just my version of the band you were into before they were famous and now you're bitter about your uncredited prescience and their selling out.
But I do think Pollan (who has the audacity to use my last name and spell it more sensibly) has come down a few pegs on the intellectual integrity board since the Second Nature salad days.
He irritates people by implicitly suggesting that we should ALL havegardenseatlocalforagemushrooms. Those are things he likes (and I like) to do, but they're not for everyone. As a twenty-year veteran of vegetarianism, I
recognize the importance of not seeming proselytizey about one's personal eating rules. It only invites backlash.
Still, those of us who do like to grow vegetables or shop at farmer's markets should be allowed to do so without whiny skeptics nipping at our heels.
"Locavore" sounds like it means eating something crazy. (Mi sandwicha loca.) But the movement the term represents is undeniably awesome. I doubt one shitty batch of ice cream will kill it.
Homespun skills get no respect. Agriculture is hard. When the $64 Tomato types try it once and fail, they throw up their hands and declare the notion of self-sufficiency absurd. It's not absurd if you know what you're doing. Learning is an upfront investment, a cost that should be amortized over a lifetime of practicing a skill.
Locavore guru Michael Pollan of course gets name-checked in the Freakonomics post. The Clebster has moved from past fanatical worship of him toward semi-disdain. Maybe he's just my version of the band you were into before they were famous and now you're bitter about your uncredited prescience and their selling out.
But I do think Pollan (who has the audacity to use my last name and spell it more sensibly) has come down a few pegs on the intellectual integrity board since the Second Nature salad days.
He irritates people by implicitly suggesting that we should ALL havegardenseatlocalforagemushrooms. Those are things he likes (and I like) to do, but they're not for everyone. As a twenty-year veteran of vegetarianism, I
recognize the importance of not seeming proselytizey about one's personal eating rules. It only invites backlash.
Still, those of us who do like to grow vegetables or shop at farmer's markets should be allowed to do so without whiny skeptics nipping at our heels.
"Locavore" sounds like it means eating something crazy. (Mi sandwicha loca.) But the movement the term represents is undeniably awesome. I doubt one shitty batch of ice cream will kill it.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Deep Thought for Monday
If we've come so far as a society,
why is the "If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again" lady
still from the fifties?
why is the "If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again" lady
still from the fifties?
Friday, June 6, 2008
Black President: Naspacbama
Made me weep. There's no actual video. Just scroll down and look at "The Pound Seen Round the World" pic below while you listen.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Wait, So...He Wins?
Really?
Nuh. Uh.
If you had told me in January that this would be, I would have said, This is all I could ever have hoped for and the sun will always shine now and nation shall not lift up sword against nation and gays will marry and good sense will prevail and nothing will ever be the same. What bad could co-exist with this?
Even if it goes only this far and no further, dayenu. One of the most extraordinary events of my lifetime.
Time does fade the drama and we have all known for a while now. Had it happened quickly, my whole system might have crashed. But I don't want to get too accustomed.
I want some of the drunken giddiness of the early days, when my realization that he really was awesome collided with his starting to win. I don't want to be nonchalant. I want to stay chalant.
Nuh. Uh.
If you had told me in January that this would be, I would have said, This is all I could ever have hoped for and the sun will always shine now and nation shall not lift up sword against nation and gays will marry and good sense will prevail and nothing will ever be the same. What bad could co-exist with this?
Even if it goes only this far and no further, dayenu. One of the most extraordinary events of my lifetime.
Time does fade the drama and we have all known for a while now. Had it happened quickly, my whole system might have crashed. But I don't want to get too accustomed.
I want some of the drunken giddiness of the early days, when my realization that he really was awesome collided with his starting to win. I don't want to be nonchalant. I want to stay chalant.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Pullets in Paradise
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