Eating guts

---

My father raised his own beef cattle, on a small scale. He'd buy one or two calves at a time, raise them to maturity, then have them slaughtered and butchered. We knew a butcher who'd take care of the whole operation – slaughtering, cutting up, grinding, wrapping – in return for a quarter of the entire animal. A small cow yields at least a couple of hundred pounds of meat (usually more), so there was plenty to go around, and our basement freezer was always full of steaks and roasts and hamburger.

 

Once, the butcher left a bucket on the back steps after the deed was done: liver, kidneys, oxtail, heart, et cetera. The tongue was lying on top, and there is nothing bigger or slimier-looking than a raw cow's tongue. “The neighbors can have 'em,” my mother said. “We don't eat guts.”

 

Well, times change. I discovered in adulthood that I have a taste for liver: it's rich and interesting. Partner, who does not share my enthusiasm, refers to it as “the cow's carburetor,” and reminds me from time to time that it's just a big meaty filter. That may well be. It's still pretty tasty.

 

A British friend in Morocco prepared kidneys for me more than once, and they're pretty savory too, though (after all) they're just filters too. I love the flavor of tongue, but the texture is a little gelatinous. (There used to be a restaurant in Tunis that did tongue in aspic as an appetizer; it was very pleasant, and I never had to worry about sharing it with anyone, once I explained what it was.) Oxtail's good, though gluey. Heart has a nice flavor, but I can't help noticing all those little veins. In Tunisia, I often ordered an egg-and-hot-peppers dish called ojja; I never really asked what was in it, so it wasn't until much later that I realized brains are a main ingredient.

 

 

And then there are all the other organs.

 

Once, in a restaurant in the Tunis medina, I was having lunch with my friend Ahmed, who was moaning as usual about his job, his love life, etc. He ordered fish, I ordered kamounia. Kamounia is a stew usually incorporating liver, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, etc.

 

But it doesn't have to be liver.

 

The waiter brought our dishes to the table. Ahmed kept talking while dissecting his fish (which was, as always, served whole). I glanced down at my plate and saw – well, a large whitish sphere.

 

Now what organ could that be?

 

Ahmed didn't notice. He just kept talking and sawing away at his fish. I thought about it for a long time. I'd always wondered what the organ in question tasted like.

 

So what the hell? I ate it.

 

 

Flavor: nothing special. Texture: a little spongy.

 

Just in case you were wondering.

 

---

 

 

 

Sunday blog: Pee-wee Herman and Andy Samberg do shots!

---

Here is a SNL Digital Short for anyone who likes any of the following:

• Pee-wee Herman;
• Andy Samberg;
• Anderson Cooper;
• Doing shots.

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/snl-digital-short-andy-samberg-and-pee-wee

---

Tunisia

---

Tunisia has been going through interesting times lately. I lived and worked there for a couple of years back in the 1980s, and I still keep in touch with some of the Tunisians I knew and worked with. They're all okay so far; they're posting on a daily basis on Facebook, and I wish my Arabic were better, because the videos and news stories are pretty interesting. I wish them, and all Tunisians, a prosperous and happy future.

 

I was there during the last few years of the presidency of Habib Bourguiba, the original President of the Tunisian Republic, le Combattant supreme. He was then in his eighties and very frail, but the country was stable and open (lots of coming and going to Europe; decent relations with most of the rest of the Arab world, with the exception of Libya – but in those days, no one got along with Libya; a broad and very effective educational system, which emphasized secondary education). It was, as we said in our office communications, “the crossroads of the Arab world.”

 

 

I lived in the old city, about two blocks from the Casbah. We were within hollering distance of two of the most famous and most beautiful of Tunis's mosques, the Zeitouna and the Youssef Dey. Both had real muezzins who intoned the call to prayer five times a day (most mosques use recordings), but the muezzins in those two mosques managed it so they never faced one another as they circled their parapets. Sometimes we'd go up to our rooftop at sunset to listen to the muezzins and watch the lights come on all over the city.

 

 

I shared the medina apartment with a number of different people, all women. The elderly landlord was baffled by this, but refused to admit it. Naturally he deferred to me as the head of the household. All of my female housemates were referred to, politely, as “Madame.”

 

There was a good restaurant not far from the Zeitouna mosque, on one of the roofed streets in the Medina. During Ramadan (when you can't eat while the sun is in the sky), we'd get a table around fifteen minutes before sundown and order harira, the thick wholesome traditional Ramadan soup. They'd serve it about five minutes before sundown. We (and all of the other diners in the restaurant) would toy with our spoons. Finally, faintly, we could hear the muezzin begin the sunset call from the Zeitouna mosque. After a minute or so, a little boy stationed down at the end of the street would frantically wave his arms, signalling to us that the call was completed, and we'd pick up our spoons and begin to eat.

 

 

My apartment had a very small balcony facing north. From there, we could see the summer thunderstorms lining up over the Mediterranean. They never came inland, but we saw the lightning flickering from the clouds at night.

 

 

One day in winter, there was a little sleet mixed in with the rain, and one of my Tunisian officemates turned to me as we watched the weather from the office window and asked: “Is this what snow is like?”

 

 

Toward the end of my time there, two of my friends drove me to an undisclosed destination. It turned out to be the very tip of Cap Blanc, the northernmost point of Africa, overlooking the Mediterranean. We watched the sun go down from there.

 

 

It was very beautiful.

 

 

Here's hoping for a peaceful and happy outcome to the Jasmine Revolution.

 

 

---

 

The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus

---

For a while in the 1940s, British cinema was really spectacular. Four movies are my particular favorites: “Black Narcissus,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” and “The Red Shoes.”

All were directed and written by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. All are in beautiful Technicolor, or some mutant version of Technicolor that's even more vivid than the real thing. All four are full of contrasts: sincerity and cynicism, religion and worldliness, life and death. All four accommodate these contrasts with ease and grace and humor. All four feature fascinating actors and actresses: Deborah Kerr, Moira Shearer, Roger Livesey, David Niven, Anton Walbrook.

Powell loved extreme close-ups and theatrical gestures and bright primary colors. And Pressburger, a Hungarian who spoke better English than most native speakers (a regular Joseph Conrad type), wrote beautiful dialogue.

My favorite is “Black Narcissus,” I think. It's based on a Rumer Godden novel about a group of Anglican nuns who set up a convent in northern India near the Himalayas. It's too much for them. They fail spectacularly, against a background of spectacular scenery.

My friend Pat prefers “The Red Shoes.” She saw it when she was a kid – but let her tell it: “I was maybe eight or nine years old. The theater was several blocks away on a very busy street – 55^th Street in Chicago – and I went to the movies every Saturday afternoon for a double feature. In those days one could sit through the showings as many times as the movie was shown and I loved the Red Shoes so much I waited through the second feature until Shoes came on again. My mother wasn’t one for franticness, but she was pretty worried when I didn’t show for dinner. She didn’t scold much though, I think she thought it was clever of me to be so entranced. After that I had to have a coloring book of ballet dancers and I remembered that the ballerina in the movie had white makeup on her eyelids and black dots in the corners of her eyes. So, naturally, all the dancers in my coloring book had to have that too.”

When's the last time a movie made you feel like that?

In the words of Libby Gelman-Waxner: this is what movies are all about.

---

My life in the drug trade

---

I read recently that people are using bath salts as a drug. No joke. Some bath salts apparently contain a potent chemical which gives you a methamphetamine-type jolt. It apparently also gives you hallucinations, intense cravings for the chemical itself (some bath-salts benders go on for days and days), and violent self-destructive impulses.

 

I don't mean to make light of this. It's just that I can't help wondering: Who in the world thought of using bath salts to get high?

 

Then again, I suppose anything that looks like powder gets snorted sooner or later, and anything that looks smokable gets smoked. Remember nutmeg? Remember banana peels? (I have a vague recollection of a woman in a Cheech & Chong movie snorting Ajax Cleanser.)

 

Apparently you can get high on salvia too. Salvia! It grows in front of the local grocery store!

 

I grew up in a very rural area. There was a lot of open space, a lot of forested area. Once, while rambling down through the field near the edge of our property, I found a neat little marijuana garden that had evidently been planted by some sneaky hippie; he'd cleared off maybe two square feet of pasture in a secluded corner, tilled the soil very carefully, and planted maybe half a dozen very cute little pot plants. I uprooted them and brought them up to the house, and my mother and I marvelled over them for a while. We debated smoking them, but decided against it. Finally we threw them in the kitchen stove and burned them. We were stupid enough to fret for a day or two that the police would somehow detect the smoke and come get us.

 

We had some pharmaceutical adventures when I was overseas, too. While I was living in Morocco, a visiting American friend came bursting through my door with a full-sized grocery bag of freshly-picked marijuana. “Five bucks!” he wheezed. “The guy in the market sold it all to me for five bucks!” He spent the rest of the day sitting at my kitchen table, humming to himself, sorting seeds, stems, and leaves. I've never seen a happier boy. And once a friend brought back some “hashish” from Spain. It looked like a lump of wood putty to me. We tried to smoke it, but it wouldn't light. Finally we chopped it up and put it in spaghetti sauce and had it for dinner. We all got violently ill afterward.

 

I'm pretty sure it was wood putty.

 

Enough reminiscing. Time for my bath.

 

---

 

 

Jumping Jack LaLanne

---

Dead at 96: Jack LaLanne. 

I remember watching elfin Jack do squat-thrusts on TV, way back in the early 1960s.  He usually wore a bizarre little loose-sleeved smock with a plunging neckline and a shiny belt-buckle (see photo above). He'd been a bodybuilder in the 1940s and 1950s, but by the time he hit TV, he bore little resemblance to today's fitness models; he looked more like a happy cabdriver or a friendly mailman.

But, like Tigger, he was very bouncy.

Also, like Tigger, it was very difficult to dislike him.

Jack's days as alpha fitness guru ended in the late 1960s, but he refused to go away.  He became a former fitness guru.  He hawked Roman Meal Bread.  Then he pitched juicers for a long time, when he wasn’t towing cabin cruisers around Long Beach Harbor.  But he was always good old Jack LaLanne, with his wife Elaine (just say it aloud: Elaine LaLanne!) and their dog Happy, all grinning into the camera, having a wonderful time.

I used to have an autographed copy of one of Jack's exercise books.  I gave it to my friend Apollonia, who gave it to her sister, a longtime LaLanne admirer.  (As my friend Sylvia says: you should pass things along.  It encourages others to do the same.  It's a reminder that life is fleeting, and that possessions are nice to hold onto for a while, but you will need to relinquish them sooner or later, one way or another.  Better to give them away willingly, to someone who will enjoy them.)

Jack was asked the secret of his longevity.  He answered: “I can't afford to die.  It would ruin my image.”

  

---

Paula Deen: full of love and lard

---

I receive emails from the Food Network from time to time. Today's email led with a PAULA DEEN RECIPE: FRIED MAC AND CHEESE.

 

A less appetizing photo you cannot imagine. It looks like a slightly burnt pound cake with a flat mealy crust. And I'm pretty sure they put a filter on the camera to keep the grease from sparkling in the light.

 

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m all for carbohydrates and fats. My grandma used to eat bread with lard on it, so it’s in my genes. And I’ve been known to double the amount of butter and cheese in a ho-hum recipe, just for kicks.

 

But Paula is – well, “over the top” doesn't even describe it. It's stunt cookery. How can we make this recipe even gooier than it already is?

 

She is also, hm, lazy. New York Magazine was kind enough to highlight her recent online recipe for English Peas. Be sure to read the users’ reviews too.

 

Memorable moments from her show:

 

• In one episode, four shirtless guys carried a coffin-sized slab of butter on a palanquin through the audience and up onto the set. I expected Paula to do the Dance of the Seven Veils in front of it.

• In another episode, she mixed peanut butter, honey, and sugar into a thick paste, scooped up handfuls of the mixture, rolled them in more powdered sugar (no cooking necessary!) and then ate one like an apple, while informing us that her grade-school lunch lady used to make something just like this.

• In yet another episode, she posed the question: How can you make a rich recipe like bread pudding even richer? Why, by replacing the bread with Krispy Kreme Donuts, silly!

 

 

What next, Paula? Crisco Fritters with Georgia Butter Sauce and Mars Bar stuffing?

 

Come to think of it, that’d be some mighty good eatin’!

 

---

 

 

Solar system brings us wisdom

---

I loved astronomy when I was a kid. I devoured all the star books in the school library. But I didn't make a career of it, for two reasons:

• I was desperately afraid of the dark until my mid-teens;
• I was (and still am) intellectually lazy.

 

 

Science takes dedication. I knew a girl in grade school who was desperately devoted to geology and paleontology; no matter what schoolwork she was supposed to do – read a book, do a report on Lewis and Clark, color Puget Sound blue – she drew dinosaurs, or did a presentation on Neanderthal Man, or built a diorama of the Paleozoic Era. The rest of us just rolled our eyes and giggled. And do you know what? She became a geologist. And I'll bet she's very happy.

 

 

Partner likes to watch TV programs about cosmology: galaxies, the Big Bang, the origin of the solar system. I like to watch them too, but they make me a little queasy. What if, I keep wondering, a mini-black hole comes sailing through the bedroom tonight, just as I'm falling asleep? Will it zap me so quickly that I don't feel a thing? What would it feel like if a medium-size asteroid were to fall to earth and hit me right on top of the head?  And can I be absolutely certain that our lovely yellow sun isn't going to suddenly flip out and go supernova?

 

But the CGI images in those programs are lovely. I like the big flares like tentacles coming out of the stars, and the nice fluffy-looking nebulae. I like the icy landscapes they show on Pluto. I am partial to all of those chilly distant Kuiper Belt bodies; they sound nice and peaceful, and I don't mind cold weather as long as I'm bundled up, and astronomers are having altogether too much fun naming them. And they get no publicity at all. Just so you know, there's Eris out there too, and Haumea, and Makemake, and Quaoar, and Orcus, and Sedna.

 

I do have a little problem, as I've said here before, with scientists who portray themselves on television as The Life Of The Party. Most of them are just schnooks like the rest of us, after all. But those science programs wouldn't be able to go on without their participation. So we listen to them yammer, the skinny ascetic-looking ones with huge ears, and the big Santa-looking ones with funny hats, and the older Ivy League-looking ones with bow ties and nasal voices.

 

 

I respect them for caring about their work.

 

 

Hell, I respect anyone who can come up with a name as good as “Quaoar.”

 

---

 

 

Sunday blog: Bow Wow Wow

---

In keeping with my recent comments about dogs, and to counteract wintertime, here's 1980s group Bow Wow Wow on a beach, buried up to their necks in sand, singing their classic "I Want Candy."

 

Arf!  Arf!

 

 

 

 

---

 

 

 

 

 

Jersey shore, season three

---

Partner and I agree that the new season of “Jersey Shore” is, well, intense. The last two episodes have been the most-watched shows in MTV's history, bitches!

What is is about this show that's so fascinating? The cast has no talent. But none. Okay, maybe Paulie has some self-awareness; he's a DJ, and he's often witty. But I am convinced that you could take MRIs of all of the rest of them, and the only things you'd find inside their heads would be fingernail clippings and dryer lint.

When you throw a random group of people together, you get an impromptu dysfunctional family. I've seen it happen in college, and in the Peace Corps. Reality television relies on this: look at “Big Brother” and “The Real World” and the rest of them. But this group, oh Jesus oh Jesus, it just keep throbbing with life. Snooki's in jail! Deena brings home a guy who looks just like Ronnie! Jwoww's fighting with her old boyfriend Tom while (at the same time) canoodling with her old/new boyfriend Roger! The Situation's brooding! Snooki's sitting in the mini-fridge because her ass itches!

Snooki is especially mysterious to me. I have some questions. Ponder them.

• Snooki has her eye on a guy named Nick, whom she describes as “Irish.” Nick has a tramp stamp that says “LA FAMIGLIA.” Why would an Irish guy have an Italian-language tattoo? Is it possible that Snooki doesn't know what the word “Irish” means?
• Why would any man find Snooki attractive? Nick's cute. I mean CUTE. He looks like Brett Favre, if he were twenty years younger and had a significantly better body. And he's dating Snooki? Is he high?
• One of the most gripping things I've ever seen on TV: Snooki eating a raw potato. A friend of mine used to talk about his Uncle Spud, who “ate green potatoes when he was a boy, and was never quite right after that.” Well, Snooki's not quite right. Are the raw potatoes to blame?
• Vinnie interviews Snooki's hair at one point. Snooki sits still and puts up with it. Paulie does the voice of Snooki's hair.  Again, Snooki just sits and lets it happen. Does Snooki understand that they're making fun of her?

This show exhausts me.  I need refreshment.  Quick, bring me a shot of Patron and a fried pickle.  With a raw potato on the side.

---

All the way with Cam Gigandet

---

Partner and I saw “Burlesque” a few weeks ago. We though it was pretty entertaining, and I learned a few things:

 

 

• Christina Aguilera can actually act.

• Cher can still sing. Pretty well, too.

• I could watch Stanley Tucci bake muffins, and I'd still give him a standing ovation.

• Cam Gigandet is adorable.

  
  

 

Young Cam plays Christina's love interest. He takes off his clothes several times during the movie, which is all the burlesque I need. There is a slow striptease/seduction scene, beginning with winsome boyish Cam in baggy flannel pajamas and concluding with naked Cam holding a box of snacks in front of his crotch. Tears of joy and longing ran down my face as I watched.

 

Trolling the Net after we got home, I found that Cam was linked with the “Twilight” franchise, but I had no recollection of him there. So I consulted my friend and coworker Apollonia.

 

Apollonia, like me, was born before the Kennedy Administration. She was a perfectly normal person until she discovered Stephanie Meyer. Now – well, if Twilight were a religion, Apollonia would be the Pope. I know for a fact that she owns a life-sized cardboard cutout of Robert Pattinson, which she used to keep in the office. She took it home finally because she was afraid someone would vandalize it. All right, she was afraid I might vandalize it.

 

Anyway, Apollonia drew her breath in sharply when I mentioned Cam Gigandet's name. “James!” she said. “You remember. He's a vampire. A very, very, very bad vampire.”

 

Ah. Now I remember. He's the roguish villain who kidnaps Bella and fights with Robert Pattinson at the end of the first movie. “He was up for the part of Edward,” Apollonia continued, in full search-engine mode, “but naturally they picked Robert Pattinson."

 

“Naturally,” I said.

 

“But,” she said, ignoring my sarcasm, “they offered Cam Gigandet the part of James.”

 

“He would have been cute as Edward,” I said. “He's a little – hmm – beefier than Robert Pattinson.”

 

“Hmm,” Apollonia said, narrowing her eyes. “No. All wrong for the part.”

 

It's unwise to belittle Robert Pattinson in front of Apollonia. She has no sense of humor on the subject. “You're not going to write about this, are you?” she said warningly. “If you do, it'd better not be snarky.”

 

“I promise,” I said.

 

I lied.

 

Cam Gigandet is much cuter than scrawny malnourished milk-white fluffy-haired Robert Pattinson.

 

 

Gotta run to the store to see if I can get a life-sized cardboard Cam Gigandet cutout. Later, kids.

 

---

 

 

The right to complain about absolutely everything

---

At fifty-three, I find myself in the demilitarized zone between middle age and old age. I used to think that people in their forties were over the hill; now, in retrospect, my forties were the bloom of youth. And, looming in the future, I can see hip replacements and cardiac episodes and mushy food and glasses even thicker than the ones I wear now.

 

 

One of the consolations of getting older is being able to complain about absolutely everything, and insisting that nothing is as good as it used to be. Pluto's not a planet anymore! Terrible. You don't have to put two spaces after the period at the end of a sentence any longer! Shocking. Cigarettes aren't good for you anymore! Well, we probably knew that anyway, but . . .

 

 

Oh well, ho hum, off to the nursing home, grump grump grump.

 

 

But then I find this nice Ben Franklin quote in last week's New Yorker:

 

 

“. . . Having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better Information, or fuller Consideration, to change Opinions even on important Subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.”

 

 

Ben said this when he was a ripe old eighty-one.

 

 

So: let things change. It's a huge waste of energy to fret over every little thing.

 

 

We can still complain, though.

 

 

Bring on the mushy food.

 

 

 

Very bad dogs

---

Back in the 1960s, I used to read a comic strip in the Vancouver Columbian called “Odd Bodkins,” written and drawn by a guy named Dan O'Neill. He was a stoner, a biker, and an independent thinker; most papers dropped his strip when they figured out what he was talking about, which was mostly dropping acid and fighting the establishment. In one of his strips, someone announced that African baboons were beginning to eat meat and use tools. “THAT'S IT!” one of the characters annouces. “GOD IS ANGRY AT US AND THE REPLACEMENTS ARE ON THE WAY!”

 

 

So I read the other day that Martha Stewart's dog punched her in the nose and sent her to the hospital.

 

 

Also, I just read an article in the Times about how dog behavior on television has gotten pretty atrocious (see especially the horrible woman on “It's Me Or The Dog” who lets her lapdog stick his tongue up her nose).

 

 

Also, there was a recent Times article about a dog named Chaser who knows over a thousand words and understands simple sentences. (This is more than most of my coworkers can do.)

 

 

I am beginning to feel that we are huddled around the campfire, and the dogs are peering at us out of the darkness with their glowing wolfish eyes, getting ready to pounce.

 

 

The replacements are on the way.

 

 

Partner's fine with this. He will tell you any day that he wishes he were a dog himself. Short of this, he wants to lie on the ground and roll around with all the dogs in the neighborhood. I think the dogs brainwashed him a long time ago. I already told you about his dog Willy, who was not prepared to be my best friend.  Willy was obviously in on the plan.

 

 

But I'm not really worried about the dogs. They're stoopid. You can always buy them off with a Beggin' Strip or a Jumbone or something of the sort. They're all about food, and they're easily distracted.

 

Yeah. Go ahead, Yukon King. Try to replace me. You've got a big surprise coming.

 

 

I'm no pushover like Martha Stewart.

 

---

 

 

Black Swan

 

Partner and I saw “Black Swan” on Sunday.

 

 

OMG!

 

First of all, Natalie Portman is just about perfect. Why does it always amaze me when a movie star actually turns in a good performance? Well, hers is better than good, it's terrific. She goes from fragile to terrifying and back again. And there's a great supporting cast: Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, and especially Winona Ryder as a washed-up ballerina who, ahem, isn't taking retirement very well at all, and who just about spontaneously combusts in her three or four little scenes.

 

It made me think of that other really excellent ballet movie, “The Red Shoes.” In “Red Shoes,” an innocent young ballerina becomes a star by portraying a role in which she dances herself to death. She falls in love with the young ballet composer, she leaves the ballet, she finds she can't live without it, she's torn, she goes back . . . Well, I won't tell you the ending. But it ain't very cheerful.

 

Same in “Black Swan,” but with a difference. The heroine is told, over and over again, that she can't dance meaningfully unless she understands the emotions underlying her role. The story of the innocent white swan and the wicked black swan starts to invade her everyday life. Creepy things start to happen. Or do they? Doesn't matter, because she dances better and better. It's the old Romantic fable of the suffering / struggling / crazy artist, except that it feels mighty real, even when people start sprouting feathers and such.

 

It doesn't matter if you like ballet or not. Just jete your little Early American butt down to the local cineplex and see it.

 

If you don't come out doing a plie and a cabriole and a grand arabesque, you're just not a human being.

 

 

 

Better jerkitude through technology

 

Have you seen these television commercials?:

 

 

• An obnoxious neighbor taunts his neighbor's holiday decorations, using text, email, and phone.

• A guy in a car pool receives an emailed joke seconds before his coworkers receive it. He reads it, laughs shrilly, and puts his phone away. When his coworkers catch up with him a few seconds later and try to share the joke with him, he feigns boredom.

• An obnoxious girlfriend (see example #1 above) breaks up with her boyfriend via text, email, and phone, while sitting at a restaurant table with him.

   

 

What is the subtext here?

 

 

Evidently that technology is a great way for jerks to enhance and improve the quality of their jerkiness.

 

 

It reminds me of a incident in Graham Greene's “Travels With My Aunt.” Henry, the narrator, is treated very rudely over the intercom by his aunt's live-in lover Wordsworth. Later, in person, Wordsworth is surprised that Henry is miffed at him. “'Man, it's jus that little mike there,'” Wordsworth explains. “'Ar wan to make it say all kind of rude things. There ar am up there, and down there ma voice is, popping out into the street where no one sees it's only old Wordsworth. It's a sort of power, man. Like the burning bush when he spoke to old Moses.'”

 

 

Anonymity allows people to be stupidly mean. Go check out the messageboards on the New York Times or New York magazine sometime; they're trolled regularly by a few anonymous people who say things they know will be inflammatory, who enjoy getting people riled up.

 

 

It's a sort of power, man.

 

 

And apparently the vendors of smartphones and such are now encouraging you to get in touch with your inner jerk, using their new technology to be an even bigger and better jerk than you already are!

 

 

As commercials go, I much prefer those Allstate ads with Dean Winters as Mayhem. He's very cute in his suit, and he has the perfect smile/snarl for someone representing a chaotic force of nature, and he winks as he leaves the scene of the crime.

 

 

If you have to be a jerk, you should at least be a sexy jerk.

 

 

 

 

Sunday blog: Happy birthday, Luise Rainer

---

Turner Classic Movies recently had a Luise Rainer evening. You know, the Viennese Teardrop.  Oh, give up, you don't know.   But anyway.  She won two Academy Awards in the 1930s, back to back, for “The Great Ziegfeld” and “The Good Earth.”

 

 

She is still alive. She turned one hundred and one years old last Wednesday.

 

 

Robert Osborne, bless his heart, did an on-stage interview with her back in 2010 when she was one hundred years old, and I just watched it on TCM. And then I watched it again. And then I taped it.

 

 

She was tiny and frail and deaf. She was wearing more jewelry than a Macy's Christmas tree.

 

 

And she was completely adorable.

 

 

“Up until four years ago, I was still so – vivid. And then I fell - idiotically - on the back of my head. And a normal person would have broken her neck. But it did not. I am a strong girl.”

 

 

And:

 

 

“First I married a beautiful man, a pIaywright, and I adored him. Clifford Odets! But we divorced. And then I found a man who was beautiful inside and out, and I married him. And he loved me idiotically! And we were very happy for forty-seven years. And he was kind, and loving, and - most importantly - to him I was the center of the universe. And that was good.”

 

 

And:

 

 

“Louis B. Mayer! Oh! He said I was Frankenstein, I would ruin the company. He was not fond of me. I was in his office, he told me that sometimes actresses sit on his knee. I said, “Mister Mayer, I will not sit on your knee.”

 

 

I paraphrase. But it doesn't matter.

 

 

Happy belated birthday, Luise.  And many more.

 

 

I love you idiotically.

 

 

---

 

 

 

Ray Davies, the greatest Kink of all

---

New York Magazine has an online feature called “21 Questions.” They choose a celebrity – an artist, an actor, a random NYC flash-in-the-pan – and ask the same set of questions: What do you think of Donald Trump? How much is too much to pay for a haircut? Do you give money to panhandlers? (The best set of answers ever were given by the actor Bernie Kopell, whom you will probably remember as Doc on “Love Boat,” but who for me will always be Siegfried on “Get Smart.” He's in his late seventies and funny as hell.)

Anyway. This past week they gave the questions to Alexis Bledel, AKA Rory from “The Gilmore Girls.” She did okay; she's no dummy. But on “Who's your favorite New Yorker, living or dead?”, she surprised me with “John Lennon.” She's right, of course. He lived in NYC for a long time, a good chunk of his life, and he died there.

So it made me think about the question, all of a sudden. And suddenly I thought: of course! Ray Davies!

Yes, I know he's English.  But he was a Manhattanite for a long time in the Seventies and Eighties and into the Nineties.  And he comes back frequently.  So he's eligible.

Ray is/was the lead singer and songwriter of the Kinks. You remember. “Lola.” “Apeman.” “Waterloo Sunset.” “Village Green Preservation Society.”

My friend Joanne, who is a pretty amusing person herself, is the number-one Kinks fan in the world. She got me listening to them back in the Seventies. Then, in 1978, when we were both graduate students at Brown, she convinced me to go with her to Lawrence, Massachusetts (or was it Lowell, Massachusetts?) and see the Kinks perform. It was a low point in their career; the hall wasn't very full. We raced outside after the concert to stake out the stage door, and found only one other fan waiting. The band members passed by: Mick Avory the drummer, who was very funny; Dave Davies, Ray's brusque angry brother, who pushed past us without talking.

And finally Ray.

And he was wonderful. He had sunglasses on at eleven-thirty at night. He signed everything Joanne gave him, including the copy of “Pippi Longstocking” she had in her purse. She complimented him on his sunglasses, and he said, with the biggest grin in the world: “They're Cool-Rays.”

Ever since, whenever I encounter a celebrity (or something resembling one), I remember Ray Davies, and how gracious and funny he was at eleven-thirty at night after a not-very-successful concert in a working town in Massachusetts.

It's settled, then.  Ray Davies is my favorite New Yorker, living or dead.

Now: how much is too much to pay for a haircut?

---

Seed-catalog nirvana

---

It is the worst bit of winter now here in New England. January and February are not bright cheerful months hereabouts; they are a long slow death-slog through snow and cold and ice and mush.  Wednesday's mini-blizzard dumped about fifteen inches of snow on us. Partner and I both had the day off – the university (wisely) closed preemptively the day before – so we stayed in the house, reading and napping and watching TV and baking. We ducked out for a while in the afternoon to shovel out the car, which took about ten minutes (thank god the building has a guy with a snowblower handy), but that was about it. Oh, and also, I took out the garbage, opened the dumpster, saw something big and furry scooting around, assumed it was a rat, shrieked, threw my garbage at it, realized (too late) that it was just Partner's favorite neighborhood squirrel, and let the dumpster lid slam down right on the poor little nutmonkey's kidney. He leapt straight up, landed on the Sno-Cat that was parked next to the dumpster, and disappeared.

 

 

I bet he really hates me now.

 

 

So it's time for seed catalogs. I dug out the Gurney's catalog yesterday evening and spent some time perusing the various fruits and vegetables and flowering plants. I love that they send these things for free. Man, you can just eat those colors! When you read these things, you always end up with huge visions of summertime – squash as big as a human head, ears of corn like torpedoes, tomatoes like volleyballs, a flower garden that looks like Middle-Earth on crack.

 

 

Unfortunately, all I have to work with is a concrete parking-lot and a very narrow windowsill.

 

 

Partner and I tilled a small plot in the local community garden for a few years. It was fun, but not very productive; everyone there was very competitive. One guy had gigantic steroid-enhanced tomato plants that looked like oak trees; that was the year of the Great Tomato Blight, though, so all the little yellow tomato blossoms dropped off before they set any fruit.

 

 

Tee hee.

 

 

You see? It turned me into a horrible person. Finally I quit doing it.

 

 

I mean, it's silly to read a seed catalog if you don't have a garden. It's like reading a cookbook if you don't have any food in the house. You're just going to make yourself hungrier.

 

 

But it doesn't seem to work that way. It's more like buying a lottery ticket. Yeah, maybe you waste a buck, or a few minutes of your time, but you come away with a beautiful dream, and a smile on your face.

 

 

And now, in the dark days of January, with a predatory squirrel on the loose who thirsts for my blood, I can use all the beautiful dreams I can get.

 

---

 

 

Grumpy old customers

---

Bad customer service makes my head cave in.

 

 

I didn't used to be this way. For a long time I was very reluctant to make a scene in a public place.  With age, though, I hide my feelings less. Also, life with Partner (who is far more forthright than I am in expressing himself) has made me a little more, ahem, openly expressive.

 

So, for example, when supermarket cashiers get impatient and reach around to push the card-reader buttons for me (TOTAL $16.13 OK? YES / NO), I have been known to slap their hands away.

 

Also, I recall a smirky little coffee-shop employee who, when I asked for a pound of coffee to be ground for espresso, informed me that I didn't really want that. I don't really remember what happened after that – I think I blacked out – but I think I decapitated him.

 

Lately Partner and I have been mixing it up at our local health club. It's only been open for a couple of years, and it's still moderately shiny, but the staff are cheerful and inept. When equipment breaks down, they hang little OUT OF ORDER signs on it and get back to their important and difficult job of schmoozing and smiling. There's been a problem with the stationary bikes lately, and the evening manager gave Partner a lot of guff last week about how difficult it is to have these things repaired, blah blah blah.

 

We have, in order to show our appreciation for her help, been writing long descriptive essays about the place, and the staff, and sending them via email to the health club's corporate office.

 

Well, the equipment's not fixed yet, but the staff is now terrified of both of us.

 

Now that's progress.

 

 

 

 

---

 

 

Land of saints and scholars

---

Partner and I spent a week in the west of Ireland back in 2007. We still daydream about it. We saw some of the tourist sights – the Cliffs of Moher, the Rock of Cashel – but we also spent time knocking around big towns and small towns, walking, taking in the sights, talking to people.

 

 

Highlights of the trip:

 

 

• Our flight got in early, and we rode from the airport to Limerick, watching the sun rise over the Irish hills.  The cabdriver never shut up. We weren't used to the accent yet, so all we could make out was golf blah blah, son-in-law blah blah. Then, just as we get to the city limits of Limerick, traffic slowed. Three huge white swans were in the middle of the road, their backs to the traffic, meandering from one side of the road to the other. “Jaisus!” the cabdriver grunted. “Fecking swans! In the middle of the road!”

• Our bus driver from Limerick to Moher was a short balding peppery guy with a short fuse. Somewhere en route, a querulous old lady got on the bus, on her way to visit a friend. She asked the driver over and over in a tearful voice how long it would take to get there, how she'd know when they got there, how she was going to get back. Finally he roared at her: “WOMAN! You've ASKED me three TIMES now how you'll know when you're there! Sit DOWN and shut UP! I'll TELL you when we GET there!” It didn't shut her up, though; she kept moaning and chattering the whole way there (to the great entertainment of the Irish people on the bus around us). She got off in Ennistymon, at what looked like a convent, and the driver was firm with her when she got off the bus: “Now, I'll be BACK through here at FIVE this afternoon. NO LATER! If you're not here, you'll NOT see the bus, and I DON'T know what you'll do then. So FIVE O'CLOCK!” We didn't see her that afternoon on the return trip. I hope she had a nice tearful visit with her friend.

• Another cab driver in Limerick: “This afternoon on the radio, they asked this old countryman from the Dingle if he was going to listen to the Kerry-Cork football game. And he said he was too busy with the cows to listen to the radio! The Dingle! The arsehole of County Kerry!”

• Street market in Limerick. Very sweet little old lady running a junk shop. Partner tells her that he's half-Irish, that his mother's name was Malloy. “Ah, Malloy!” the old lady said. “From up north! They're known for being . . . very canny people!” Well, naturally, we had to buy something from her after that.

 

 

We're going back at our earliest opportunity, canny people that we are.

 

---

 

 

True Grit

---

 

Partner and I saw “True Grit” last week. I was doubtful at first that this movie needed to be remade; then I realized that all I remembered from the 1969 original was John Wayne's eyepatch, and Kim Darby (of whom no one had ever heard, and about whom we never heard again).

 

 

 

 

We liked the new version. It looks like the American West (and I should know): washed-out, sepia-toned. Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn is funny and gruff and grumpy and earnest, and (best of all) he doesn't try to imitate John Wayne. And there's no reason he should. The original “True Grit” was a star vehicle for Wayne. The new movie doesn't fall into that trap – well, at least until about twenty minutes before the ending, but we'll talk about that later. Hailee Steinfeld is grave and intelligent and bloodthirsty and a general pain in the ass and very funny. Matt Damon is vain and silly, but almost as brave and tough as he thinks he is, and he's adorable. And Josh Brolin, the villain who only appears late in the movie, is perfect: bland, venal, amoral.

 

 

 

 

This is a strange Western. You can see it as a myth if you like: the maiden America moving West into Indian territory (and literally kicking the Indians aside), encountering three different American types: the tough handsome (and unreliable) daddy, the vain handsome (and unreliable) loner, the dangerous handsome (and very unreliable) outlaw. She rejects all three. She kills one of them, she loses track of the other two.

 

 

 

Or you can make it a religious drama. Rooster is Jesus, redeeming us. He dies three days before Mattie finds him again. He has one eye, like Wotan. Yeesh. Let's leave that interpretation lying on the ground where we found it.

 

 

 

Or maybe it's no myth at all. The 1969 version had heroes and villains. This version has characters. Nobody's perfect. Stuff happens. Everybody dies.

 

 

Unfortunately, as I said, the last twenty minutes of this movie fall apart. There's a delirious sequence which seems (unlike the rest of the movie) unreal. Then there's a sudden jump of twenty-five years, narrated by a character who seems to be telling the story from even further in the future. It's not quite satisfactory.

 

 

 

 

But all in all it's quite a movie. The images and the performances are very beautiful. I found myself dwelling on several scenes, even days after seeing it.

 

 

 

 

Go see it, you low-down varmints.

 

---

 

 

Drinking poison

---

I bought the most darling little bottle of poison the other night, and I'm gonna drink it one of these evenings soon.

 

 

No, I'm not talking about suicide.  I'm talking about absinthe.

 

 

I've been reading about it for years; I'm a great fan of the French writers and composers and artists like Satie and Debussy and Mallarme and Verlaine and Manet, and they were all absinthe drinkers. Absinthe is the “fee verte,” the Green Fairy. It is an odd liqueur, full of herbs, including wormwood. Wormwood contains an odd little cannabinoid called thujone. Thujone is a hallucinogenic, and a poison. It is supposed to send you into a dreamy trance that the French called “l'heure verte,” the Green Hour.

 

 

That's for me!

 

 

Absinthe was illegal in the USA for a long time. We're such prudes. It became legal again a few years ago (so long as the thujone levels are very very low), and hipsters have brought it back into fashion. Did I mention there are elaborate absinthe-drinking rituals? Naturally there are. You can use a special slotted spoon to infuse your absinthe with sugar and cold water, drop by drop. You can set your absinthe on fire. You can pour your absinthe over a lump of sugar, then set the sugar on fire, then stir the caramelized sugar into the absinthe . . .

 

 

Oh, who cares? It's a toxin. It makes you drunk and kills your brain cells by the kajillions. But if it makes you write music like Satie and Debussy, or paint like Manet, or write like Mallarme, it's for me.

 

 

The full-sized bottles are atrociously expensive. I bought a little nip-sized bottle down at the local liquor store for $7.95, and it is adorable, very 1890s. The brand is “Le Tourment Vert,” the Green Torture.  

 

 

I haven't tried it yet. I want to buy some sugar cubes first. I need to do this right.

 

 

If it kills me, I'll let you know.

 

 

 

---

 

 

Sunday blog: Getting political

 

---

I had a nice light-hearted little Pointer Sisters video all queued up for today, but real life came crashing in and made it seem irrelevant.  

 

 

As of this writing, on Saturday evening, Representative Giffords has made it through surgery, and the doctors appear to be optimistic.  I hope she makes it.   I am so sorry for those who died in the shooting, and for their families, and I send best wishes for the recovery of all of the other victims.

 

 

I thought it would be appropriate today to share the above picture with you (if you can't see it clearly, I've made it available here online).  This illustration is taken from SarahPac.com, Sarah Palin's political-action committee's website.  After the tragic shootings in Tucson on Saturday, the worms at SarahPac.com thought it politically prudent to remove this image from their website.

 

 

But some of the rest of us - quite a lot of us, actually - are determined to keep it alive on the web.  

 

 

Please recopy this freely, and spread it as widely as possible.

 

 

Hey, Sarah: how's that shooty-shooty thing workin' out for you?

 

---

 

 

Old, cranky, and frail

---

I walk to work almost every morning.  It takes about half an hour, and I burn a few calories, and I get a chance to talk to myself while waving my arms and everything.  All the people driving by think I'm a lunatic.

 

So I get to work the other morning - it was around twenty-eight degrees outside, by the way - and I am delicately trying to blow my nose.  And one of the younger staff members in my office, maybe twenty-four or twenty-five years old, chirps at me, "Oh my goodness, are you sick?"

 

So I scowl at her and say, "No, my nose always runs like this after I've been in the cold for half an hour.  It happens when you get older."

 

Do you remember when people used to say things like that to you?  

 

(Well, maybe you're still young and are still accustomed to hearing it from cranky geezers like me.  If so, mazel tov.)  

 

It's fun to bark at young people.  I like to watch them quiver.

 

But it's not altogether pleasant, this whole body-falling-apart thing.

 

Remember when you looked out the window at a fresh blanket of snow and thought, "Oh boy, no school"?  Now Partner and I (combined ages 117) look out and see broken hips and emergency rooms and artificial knees and six weeks of physical therapy.

 

So we pace ourselves.  We are seldom out past ten o'clock at night.  We do not do grocery shopping and laundry on the same evening, because we might overtax ourselves.  We generally allow ourselves a few extra minutes to get places and do things, because you never know when your shoulder is going to pop out of joint, or blood might start gushing out of your nose, or God knows what else might happen.  Hell, if we move too fast, we might strain a giblet, or pop a kidney, or snap one of our chalky frail bones right in half.

 

It's a regular race to the old-folks home.

 

Last one there gets to push the wheelchair!

 

---