Ou Sont Les Gold Diggers D’Antan?

May 26, 2012 //
0

Reading the biography of Pauline Kael out of, I suppose, infernal boredom. But I am interested in her love of ’30s movies and ’30s musicals — pre-code was good. Just saw Gold Diggers of 1933 which is awesome, carnal, and saucy in every way — there’s a whole Busby Berkeley number with Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell called “Pettin’ in the Park”.

And the other blowout Berkeley number is his pean to the World War I veterans now on the soup lines. The movie is fresh and contemporary in every way. There’s real sex without the gross 21st century Jaws mastication trope movie kiss — I mean I know people kiss like that, sort of, sometimes, part of the time, but not every time, it’s a videogenic, kinetic version of a passionate kiss — aaaaaaaaaaaaaaanyway — Gold Diggers of 1933 has real sexy girls — Joan Blondell! the original wise-cracking sidekick! – falling out of their teddies while needling each other about their show girl virtue in what they call “the show business”. And for mancake, well, white tie and tails and high-waisted boxer shorts with a three-button waistband. Meaning, 24-inch waists.

Something happened to movies between then and now. There’s a thing in American movies I pretty much can’t watch, and I think it’s the lizard eye of the pornographer’s camera. You can’t get away from it, and you only realize it’s there when you watch a Japanese or a French or an Australian or a British movie. They don’t have it. I remember watching The Cook, the Thief et al, a 1989 British movie which actually has Helen Mirren running around naked, and a great number of other cannibalistic carnal scenes too. But I realized the existence of that lizard thing watching that very kinky flick. It doesn’t have it — and neither does John Waters, for example, at his most coprophagic. Neither does Gold Diggers and its take on economic implosion is as fresh today, relevant, as it was 80 years ago. And the “Forgotten Man” Busby Berkeley number, with a solo by Etta Moten, the woman who went on in 1943 to sing Bess in Porgy and Bess*, is an amazing confection of populist resentment and Berkeley’s characteristic (soldier-inspired?) sort of marching band choreography.

This is Ginger Rogers, in what I think is her first film role. She doesn’t dance. She does sing in Pig Latin.

And here is the electrifying Forgotten Man number. Please note Blondell’s 1933 hooker-with-the-heart-of-gold outfit. I think I saw Madonna wearing this to temple the other day.

____________

*And lived to be 102! She died in the 21st century! What a story!

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Categories movies

Healthy Lunch Meat Chronicles II

May 25, 2012 //
2

Lunch. Texas caviar awaiting its homemade pita chips.
http://homesicktexan.blogspot.com/2006/12/black-eyed-peas-for-new-years-day.html

Dinner. The first hors d’oeuvre in Elizabeth David‘s Summer Cooking, a work of genius.
A.) I was way too hungry to style this properly. B.) Eggs for dinner only if you have two dozen farm-laid ones given by friends.

Next up, omega threes per the really stinky French healthy lunch meat, anchoaide de Croze, which is even less photogenic.

I wouldn’t say meatless is cheap. The fresh ingredients for the Texas caviar, the olives, radishes, French bread, cultured butter and some other non-meat groceries ran me nearly $60 at Whole Paycheck. But both are meals I can have a couple of times — let’s say they’re six meals. I really should work out the financials. Next year in Jerusalem.

Nothing I’ve eaten lately falls under the cuisine dolce far niente rubric. Except that really excellent, sublime, actually, dinner of mango sherbet and honey-roasted almonds on a day I didn’t feel like cooking. Mmmm.

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Categories food

Healthy Lunch Meat Chronicles

May 23, 2012 //
0

This is my quest, for budget, health and happiness, in 2012. I don’t want to fall back on purchased lunch meat or leftovers, but rather to have something special for lunch, with an emphasis on omega threes and greens. The previous fallback has been home-roasted org turkey breast, which is very easy and which I’m very fond of, but which can be pricey and less greeny and fishy than variety suggests.

So far we have had

  • home-made Spam (Fannie Farmer‘s ham loaf with Costco ham ground at home and frozen in 1 lb. packages),
  • ditto salmon loaf (not cheap, but better and cheaper than the traditional canned salmon, with frozen wild-caught filets: I need to investigate Costco’s farm-raised filets),
  • home-brined tongue
  • ricotta spinach pie (>:-P)
  • very garlicky hummus made in 10-minutes with beans soaked overnight and cooked in the pressure cooker, served with demi-peeled cucumber dice
  • Cafe Lula’s awesome peanut butter, sambal, sprouts, cukes, and when in season, tomato Tineka sandwich,
  • chick pea and lentil dal, with Basmati rice, broccolli, and tamarind-date chutney, which may be the perfect vegan meal…except for the quantities of CLARIFIED BUTTER in the dal
  • Fergus Henderson‘s lima bean/cauli/leek salad with lemon/garlic vinaigrette
  • and etc.

Goals have been to steer away from cholesterol and nitrates. (Successful: I had a slice of bacon about two months ago and I nearly passed out. WOW.) And to up fish and greens. (Remind me to add sardines, smoked, in oil, to my grocery list. Licious.)

The least successful of the purpose-built for lunch dishes was the ghastly ricotta-spinach pie, which was also too ugly to want. Given two dozen farm-laid eggs two generous friends gave me, I splurged choles on a frittata with a ton of Parm and broccolli rabe, which is possibly among the best leftovers on the planet and full of greens.

Some of my favorite greens ingestion methods are

  • Glory brand canned collards, nuked for lunch, with Vidalia onion chopped on top
  • a bag of defrosted frozen spinach mixed into a nutmeggy, garlicky turkey/pork/beef loaf
  • beans and greens, like chard in pureed white bean soup, or escarole sauteed with garlic and white canellinis and, finally,
  • a huge veg soup, tons of celery, carrot, onion, beans, thyme with a bunch of kale in chiffonade.

A big veg soup, with beefy stock and tomato and a few beans with lots of veg makes a very satisfying light hot cheap lunch. As the Asians know. Salad I find disheartening for lunch.

I have re-invested in this cookbook, which I deacquisitioned two moves ago, because as I recall she has great menus, good recipes for cold green soups and summery picnic dishes for keeping in the fridge, and obvs everything is cooked ahead. I like to cook every two days and freeze my own Lean Cuisines. I think this book will work for me.

http://www.amazon.com/Cold-Cuisine-Helen-Hecht/dp/0689111304

Maybe I’ll cook my way through this and Elizabeth David‘s Summer Cooking this summer.  There’s an anchoiade with figs I’m up for. Mmmmm.

Elizabeth David, circa 1960

Elizabeth David, circa 1960 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today, it’s Texas caviar, with frozen home-cooked black-eyed peas, and the Homesick Texan’s bumpin’ recipe. You have got to try it. Do the Rotel. You know you want to. And read the chile’s blog.

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Categories food

Internet Ethics: Yvestown Raises the Roof

May 21, 2012 //
6

So Yvonne Eijkenduijn is probably one of the most influential DIY interior designers on the internet.

She purveys the popular northern Euro all-white aesthetic — well exemplified by Suki in Helsinki or  Benita Larsson who also DIY it –  of what is, I think, an essentially Gustavian Swedish style to offset long grey winters, where evening falls at 3 p.m., with glowing white or pastel interiors.

Eijkenduijn and her husband are meticulous renovaters and crafters; she adds minimal pops of floral color and hand-crafted or peeling vintage things to her white rooms, which makes them seem less twee than beautifully ordered and sculpted. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t like Eijkenduijn’s style. Essentially Eijkenduijn and Gustav solve the problem of how to make uncluttered modern interiors femme. It is the moral question of the 20th century: where is a girl supposed to sit, and concatenate the moral community home represents, in a Bauhaus living room?

Eijkenduijn’s kitchen. http://www.yvestown.com/archive/2012/05/kitchen-update.html

Eijkenduijn has been blogging for seven years and has made a design career from the success of her blog. It carries no ads, which seems to be a point of pride — and an Old School WELL-era  internet campaign — among the professional DIY home design visionaries like Anna Dorfman, for example. Others, equally inspiring and creative, seek sponsors, like Morgan Sattersfield,  for example,  with her hard-core thrifted mid-century-modern Palm Springs Cali aesthetic,  or suburban DIY nesters who have monetized their blogs and, in the case of John and Sherry Petersik, for example, do a terrific professional job.

Eijkenduijn has always seen the blog as a cottage industry marketplace to sell books or yarn, other peoples’ creations and, less often, things she has made. She solicits sponsors and swag in a way the Petersiks, who live off the income generated by their sponsors, do not. The Petersiks, for example, both of whom have creative backgrounds in advertising,  clearly state they don’t accept products for review, and recommend only things they actually use. It is the foundation of their trustability and, I believe, their huge traffic.

But Eijkenduijn recently asked her readers to pay her back for all the time she’s put into the blog by contributing money to build her a new roof. Lots of readers are pissed off. I am slightly put off too, as if I had been lulled into thinking she’d invited me to dinner and then presented me with a check.

What do you think? Should we chip in for Yvonne’s roof? Has she made a faux pas? Is it a cultural thing that her American readers are pissed off and the Europeans aren’t? Are Americans, who generally believe that journalism is about hustling your music video, naive? What’s happening?

Update 5/22/12: Eijkenduijn has taken down her roof fund posts with  strange rancor.

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Categories art, crafting, internet ethics

Bay Ridge, 1976

May 20, 2012 //
0

This was only slightly less electrifying than the original New York magazine story.
http://nymag.com/nightlife/features/45933/

Nik Cohn sort of made the whole story up.

But we really did walk down the street that way. Thanks, Bee Gees.

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Categories news

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, 1925-2012

May 19, 2012 //
0

Wehrmacht stable boy on the Russian front, P.O.W. entertainer, baritone, most-recorded singer, transcendentalist.

The German character, which has been under scrutiny since Luther advised his princes to “smite, slay, and stab” a peasant insurrection because the Devil was in the lower classes, has several threads. Fischer-Dieskau, the foremost interpreter of German lieder, who memorized Morgenstern’s poems on the Russian front, took his homeless mother to the opera after she was bombed out, and interposed art to every calamity, represents what is immortal in the German character. The idealism.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/arts/music/dietrich-fischer-dieskau-german-baritone-dies-at-86.html?_r=1

The recording of Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert’s lieder is the one I sent to a dying friend, who had been born in Germany. Hopefully, it took him to heaven.

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Categories art, news, spiritual

Penstemon palmeri

May 18, 2012 //
0

1. [Redacted from private blog.]

This goes into the iron box with the fork. I’m done.

2.

I have been thinking that 17 per cent lung capacity (2010, gift of second-hand smoke) cannot cash the checks 67 per cent (2009, gift of glaucoma medication, invested all my money in a large house and garden) wrote. It’s not true. I have my Safco collapsible hand truck at hand, and moved 300 lbs. worth of planters in under 10 minutes.

3.
Yeah, it’s a buzz saw. I walked into it. Because I am immune, invisible, and bullet-proof.

I’m done. Moving into Forgiveness 401, which is this.

4.
One of the fruits of sitting in the garden crocheting is you realize that solutions to your practical problems, as well as happiness and heaven, are at hand.

The rosa glauca, having moved on from lovely blossom, concatenates hips, while I concatenate lace.

5.
I have been dreaming of Dean Riddle’s garden, and having runner beans on bamboo tripods, for at least 10 years. Last year I planted them along the 120-degree Muralla del Muerto and they were toast.

I planted them in a better place this year.

6.
What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore– And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over– like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

– Langston Hughes

7.
It might could grow in the desert. Where it is planted.

Penstemon palmeri.

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Categories crafting, spiritual

Straight Skinny Epitaph: Charles Louis Brown, 1936-2012

May 17, 2012 //
0

Brown invented go-go music, which defines the independent alt. culture history of Washington D.C. as the capital of the African diaspora.  Music theorist and visionary. Culture czar of Chocolate City.

“It’s about love, the communication between performer and audience,” Mr. Brown said of go-go. “When you’re on stage, the people put that love to you and you give it back. There’s no other music like it.”

Next time you hear a politician say he’s running against Washington, think of Chuck.

My go-go at the Smithsonian epiphany: I went down to the brown bag lunch time lecture on D.C.’s indigenous music, expecting a crowd of perhaps 50 — the usual size for these esoteric yet superficial talks.

There were at least 3,000 people there, all of them in crisp creased blue collar uniforms. The subway drivers, the UPS guys, the janitors, the mailpeople, the bus drivers, the dental hygienists and LPNs in their pink scrubs, the people you always wondered about how they kept their shit together to send their children to Catholic school and on to college. The answer? Go-go. The godfather of go-go, Chuck Brown, was there. Everyone had mind-bogglingly sophisticated questions about studio technology, entertainment law, music theory and so on, and Chuck Brown — also amazingly groovy after 180 years of playing rough, nut-cuttin’ crowds at the Ibex — oh, the Ibex — had nothing but the sweetest love and brilliant advice to give back.

Everybody had both a right livelihood and a right vocation, as Buddha in his Noble Eight-Fold Path recommends. I call this my go-go vision.

Keep what you got
Until you get what
You need y’all
You got to give a lot
Just to get what
You need sometimes y’all
Gimme the bridge now
I feel like busting loose
Busting loose

XHHNXesVW88

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Categories art, news, urban theory

On the Road

May 16, 2012 //
0

1. One of my craft blog ladies lives in an isolated and remote place in Scotland and is a big religious person. She hasn’t been to church in more than a year because the last one she tried was “too legalistic”, and chased away her now adult children from the practice of Christianity. So she literally has gone without much company for 18 months. She writes about keeping house, and she knits, masterfully, the kinds of things a four-year-old girl would like, in the same kinds of colors. Each post has a greeting card-like illustration and her header shows her laundry blowing in the wind. I am mesmerized. Finally she went to a “non-denominational” ladies’ Bible study which she seems to find congenial. A lot of the British craft bloggers — if not all of them — are very much into the baking and knitting and tea pinny porn mode. But there is a lot of struggle in people’s lives, and sometimes that breaks through the iron grip of the stiff upper lip. I do wish she’d write more about living in Bumfuck, Scotland, than the Lord, however.

2. My absolutely excruciating four-day peregrinations to reinstall wi fi at the Rancho Atomico led me to a big fancy mall in the striving white people neighborhood, across the six-lane highway from the mall where the Apple store is. CenturyLink has their “store” in a kiosk next to a carrousel run by one of several young women at the mall in skintight jeans and 8-inch heel, porn star platform shoes.

I said to the big ‘n’ tall, buzz cut 30ish Chicano man who ran the kiosk that I’d once spent three days in a mall gathering signatures for a petition, and I’d go home at night, get into bed, close my eyes, and the Muzak would play on. He made Real Eye Contact and said, Oh man. Sometimes I just go out and sit in my car. For the silence.

3. The manager of my local greasy (actually a locavore place with dynamite food) is going to Hawaii for the first time for her vacation. She’s more excited than I’ve seen her in two years. I finally figured out why she’s so hard-working and reserved. She’s German. Not from around these parts. We talked about Dogtown and Z Boys and how Hilo-born Larry Bertlemann’s signature move, touching the wave, created the classic ’70s down-low skateboarding style. (Watch the flick; it’s basically about how gangs help fatherless boys. There are references to Peter Pan; they were completely self-aware. Naturally, my favorite, Jay Adams, the youngest and most-talented, grew up to be a meth head.)

4. I can get anybody to talk about anything. The granny ass mein works as well, if not better than, the 20th century fox one did. The checkout chick at the supermarket said, Thanks for being human. I said, No, you !

5. Thinking about 21st century journalism and the real 300-word story, which is not a television news-lite story, I realized if I started carrying my teeny video cam and recording these convos, with their permission, that would be it. I just don’t feel like being such a paparazzo right now.

6. But it’s what I love to read on the internet. I read a list of about 10 craft bloggers every day, people mastering life. It’s what I’d love to watch, too.

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Categories crafting, journalism

Journalism for the 21st Century 3: Britney and the 300-Word Story

May 15, 2012 //
0

There’s great confusion about what the role of the press in a democracy is. The majority of Americans in a recent poll think the role of the press is as a consumer watchdog. Pew regularly surveys people for their views of the press, and their results are always heartening.

Another scholar stipulates that the news in any country is shaped by four social imperatives: the role of the news in a democracy; the corporate structure of news production; the entertainment imperative of news; and the political behavior of news entities in the United States.
http://faculty.uml.edu/sgallagher/culturalcon.htm

For the sake of clarity, I would like to define the news as the founding fathers saw it — an instrument of knowing so important to the democracy that journalism is the only industry mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.

Jefferson defined the news very simply. He said, “The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

This is the prize on which, as stories get shorter and shorter, and newspapers disappear, we need to keep our eyes. I’ve previously referred to this as the League of Women Voters value-neutral policy paper model of journalism.

As I am concerned here to define 21st century journalism, without proscribing it, I’d like to stick as close to the original, rather juridical definition of it, as the instrument of an informed electorate bent, pretty much, on revolution, with the truth and nothing else as their legal defense.

One of the many things that people don’t understand about newspaper journalism is how legal standards of evidence — will this stand up in court? — are deployed during the editing of every story that is published.  (Television news is different.) And, given the law’s long history of being argued and re-invented, I think its “interactive” standards of evidence are as close to justice as human beings are going to get. So we have journalism as the peoples’ instrument of knowing, and its bona fide practice based on legal standards of evidence.

Today I’m going to start to examine and review the ideas of two internet entrepeneurs about what the news is. LOL Cats founder Ben Huh has a “re-imagined” news startup, Circa, scheduled for launch this summer.
http://blog.cir.ca/

Huh is promising to re-invent news for the internet. Schell Games CEO Jesse Schell has interesting ideas about the “gamification” of the news and its interactivity (the whole subject of “citizen journalism” – unpaid content provision, Wiki researchers, the HuffPo’s uncompensated bloggers, and curated comment falls under the “gamification” rubric) .

I am taking their thoughts as typical — however unfair that may be — of the definitions that millennial entrepeneurs with agency have for news in the 21st century. It can’t represent the confusion millenials have about what news is, or their significantly good ideas about it. Hopefully the analysis of  Huh’s and Schell’s ideas will serve as the caveat emptor on their ideas, the warning that the majority of Americans thinks the news should be.

Young people think Jon Stewart is the news, that the mashup, hip-hop soundbite, satirical pastiche of events served up by Stewart – the latest in a series of television comedians, from Carson’s monologue through Saturday Night Live’s weekend news update – is what the news is.

They’re not wrong.

But they’re not right either, and I would argue that if making fun of the news alienates voters, which I suspect it does, a correction needs to be made. Comedians need to start registering ten young people to vote for every political joke they tell on national television. Hopefully having a government that represents the comedians’ constituency would put the comedians out of business.

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/829/the-daily-show-journalism-satire-or-just-laughs

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/arts/television/17kaku.html?pagewanted=all

But to bite the news, as the comedians would have it, requires a certain kind of news story. I was recently asked to write a 300-word story a week for the electronic newsletter of a public access television station.  I told the millennial editor in charge I had no access to 300-word stories. She was convinced a 300-word story was the précis of a 1500-word one, or a 13,000 word one (I chose that figure in honor of Norman Lewis, whose 1969 multi-thousand word story, “Genocide in Brazil”, was the longest ever published by the London Sunday Times. It resulted in the founding of Survival International and was later published as The Missionaries: God Against the Indians. You see where this is headed.)

Norman Lewis, journalist, author of The Missionaries: God Against the Indians, and a long-form news story, “Genocide in Brazil”, which helped found Survival International.

The young editor was entirely uninterested in,  and non-comprehending of,  the conceptual parameters of the 300-word story.

It is the crux of 21st century journalism.

News is not the promotion of your music video,  your comedy routine, or any other kind of advocacy. Still, Jon Stewart, Seth Myers, Johnny Carson, every comedian whose daily bread was political commentary is biting the 300-word story – and never the 15,000-word Pulitzer Prize winning series on violence in the Philadelphia public schools.

Among other things, the 300-word story needs to be about someone we all recognize. There is no space to describe and introduce anybody.  For the same reason, this well-known person needs to be in an instantly recognizable setting,  making a gesture – a soundbite isn’t as good – within the context of his celebrity and environment that is also instantly recognizable.  From this instantly comprehensible vignette, the comedians start their riff. Or apply, if you will, their meta political critique.

The perfect 300-word story — a recognizable person making a recognizable gesture —  is the crux of journalism for the 21st century.  (P. S. If Britney can make it through 2007, you can make it through today.)

The 300-word story requires access to celebrities doing stuff.  The medium — 300 words — ensures that celebrity news will probably be the cockroach, or the PVC shopping bag with a biological half-life of 500,000 years, that survives us all.

The only people who can produce 300-word stories are beat reporters – one reason I’m mesmerized by the TMZ paparazzi and their dubious, but incredibly hotttt, SUV enterprise journalism. I don’t blame Britney for falling for Adnan Ghalib. The great chronicler of Britney’s meltdown, Vanessa Grigoriadis in Rolling Stone, didn’t either:  Ghalib winds up begging Grigoriades to be gentle with the mentally unstable superstar.

The 300-word story is the medium for the 21st century. Our problem is that it is the message too, and that long-form print journalism which ends genocide, or, like the  Philadelphia Inquirer series which recently won the Pulitzer Prize for uncovering violence in the public schools, will disappear. Hip-hop soundbite news, the Afro pomo homo pastiche, is the only one which can compete for our internet attention. Our problem is how to package the 50,000 word story in three hundred, or 140 Tweet characters, for such information consumers as Joe Weisenthal, the finance blogger. A recent, 2,887-word profile of Weisenthal suggests him as my prototypical 21st century news consumer . He wakes up at 3:50 a.m. in his apartment just north of the Financial District in New York City and Tweets  What did I miss?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/joe-weisenthal-vs-the-24-hour-news-cycle.html?pagewanted=all

To summarize the points of reference in the discussion of 21st century journalism, and to make a critical point: how to write the 300-word story, especially for television news, is no big secret. In 1965 they were telling us that the secret of writing a three-minute news story for television was to say what the story was you were about to tell, to say, now I’m telling you the story, and then to say, this is the story I just told you.

This is the story I just told you:

  1. As space for journalism decreases,  confusion about all its roles must be stripped away, and it is up to journalists to make this clear to their consumers.
  2. The role of journalism as government  and institution watchdog, meeting juridical standards of evidence, is the only prize we can afford to keep our eyes on. (Questions of monetization of internet news and truth police fall under this rubric.)
  3. LOL cats founder Ben Huh and Schell Games CEO Jesse Schell will be our models of millennial internet entrepeneurs defining news for the 21st century. They have the power, the motive, the opportunity. Do they have any clue? (The queer theory observation that the founders of TMZ and Gawker both are gay men fearlessly proselytizing gender equality and outing allegedly gay celebs, along with the gossip, the snark, the aggregated news, the curated comments,  falls under this rubric.)
  4. Joe Weisenthal, the 24/7 news vacuum, is our model consumer. (That the rush of megalo information, not just the surfing, is the medium of the 21st century news, and that Internet finance itself as well as finance journalism has created and valorized it, and will skew click-counting journalism values toward capitalism and the white boys, falls under this rubric.)

Joe Weisenthal, finance blogger, our typical 21st century journalism consumer. By Marvin Orellana for The New York Times.

Tomorrow:  Analysis of Ben Huh and Jesse Schell concepts of journalism

http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/05/cheezburgers-ben-huh-says-news-organizations-should-think-like-teenagers-if-they-want-to-survive/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/05/super-mario-cub-reporter-jesse-schell-on-what-the-game-industry-could-teach-the-news-industry/

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Categories journalism, news, politics, television
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