Sometimes it’s hard to tell if a good day is just an aberration, or an indication that the world isn’t quite so hanging-by-a-thread, baseline, to-the-core rotten as I usually assume.
Such was the case with my recent good day.
I’m not a vegetarian, but… January 27, 2008
Don’t you totally love it when someone writes an entire (really good) article saying that people should eat less meat then makes a big point of saying that they are not a vegetarian?
Because, really, what could be worse than someone mistaking you for a vegetarian? I can’t think of anything.
You know what else I love? When that same someone goes on a food radio show plugging their book called “How To Cook Everything Vegetarian” (a most insulting, solipsistic title, if you ask me) and says right off the bat that tempeh sucks* and they wish they didn’t have to have the word “vegetarian” in the title of their book.
You know who I don’t love? MARK BITTMAN.
I mean, how much crap does a feminist vegetarian have to put up with these days? I thought I’d escaped the annoying “I’m not a feminist, but…” women in college (you know those women, the ones who then go on to exactly definite feminism – “I’m not a feminist, but I believe in equal rights for women, the right to choose, freedom from oppression of all kinds…”) but these days I can’t seem to turn on my computer without hitting an article or a book written by the “I’m not a vegetarian, but…” people. Ugh.
*To be fair, until I started making my own tempeh I wasn’t a huge fan of it either. But I wouldn’t expect Mr. Minimalist to know anything about homemade tempeh.
mindblowingly stupid January 26, 2008
I love Alternet. I rely on it as my primary information/opinion source and even though their recent redesign made absolutely no sense to me, they are still my homepage (I can’t say “it” about Alternet – it’s a friendly, lively group of people in my mind) – though others in my household have decamped to HuffPo.
But my god, sometimes they fuck up on such a colossal scale that I just stare at the screen in amazement. “Is Wearing Makeup A Feminist Act?” by Kate Ward, “a recent graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University” (my mom went to Medill, so no doubt it’s a great school, but, ugh – the youth of today!) was so shockingly stupid that I feel the immediate need to point it out to everyone.
“Forget thinking beauty products are one more form of patriarchy. Your next trip to Sephora might as well be a bra-burning.”
No matter that all feminists worth their stripes know that the bra-burning thing was a myth, and no matter that that second sentence doesn’t actually, grammatically, make much sense, but since when did feminism become about endless consumerism of potentially toxic, probably tested on animals, and certainly useless pots of time-wasting goop?
Is it embarrassingly old school to believe that women’s faces without toxic chemicals and colors, waxes and dyes, are beautiful? And why didn’t they put “beauty products” in quotes, to point out the oxymoronic stupidity of such a phrase?
The article is all about how we should love wearing makeup because 1) it’s been done for a long time* 2) men used to do it too, 3) sisters be makin’ money off it, 4) it’s a way for women to assert their independence (I will spare you the bizarre logic that led to that conclusion). As usual, the best line comes at the end:
“So why not celebrate these innate refined tastes of ours by opening our cosmetic bags and embracing our inner make-up artist?”
WOW. Good old essentialism. Since women are naturally dainty, let’s be sure we all play the part!
(Parenthetically, I think I am going to privately start calling my period “opening my cosmetic bag.”)
I’m not saying that women who wear makeup are tools of the patriarchy.
I can see how it might be fun to mess around with it once in a while (like Halloween). But, though it sounds painfully uncool, I must make the point that in a patriarchal society all kinds of useless customs must be upheld in order to divert women’s attention from the real work of bringing about radical feminist revolution/revolution grrl style now, and makeup is the leader of the pack.
Makeup, shaving my legs, walking in high heels – I refuse to do these things not because I don’t like to look my best (I do), but because they demand time I refuse to give. I will spend time arranging my hair and picking out my outfit because I, like most others, choose to control and cultivate the image I present to the outside world, but my beauty standards just don’t include face paint and torture devices. Everyone must decide this line for themselves – for some women it’s shaving their heads, for some it’s makeup and high heels. I don’t blame women for their choices (though I do occasionally judge them). I just hope we’re all making these choices consciously.
This article does less than nothing to contribute to the discussion.
*Fun fact! “Women’s leadership in makeup dates back…further than the word “feminism” itself.”
You mean there were women being leaders before Christine de Pizan (obligatory Women’s Studies major showoff reference) coined the term feminism in the 1400s? Who knew? I thought that women being real people began the day bras were first burned! My mind was just blown, Ms. Recent Graduate.
NYerWbW January 21 issue; Secret Ingredients; a picture of two chickens on a fence January 25, 2008
All in all, a pretty good issue! Diversity of ages, genders, and races pretty damn well represented! Disturbed kids setting fires, disturbed kids committing suicide, fascinating women artists being fascinating artists, no modifier necessary! Egyptian kids playing squash! Jane Austin! Othello (I guess it’s cheating to count Othello as representing diversity, though, being as he is kind of made up and all)! The Roz Chast on p. 32 made me blush!
Kind of gives one hope for 2008!
Or maybe it’s just 3 am and I am jet-lagged! Jet-lag-usta!
how cute is my mom? January 23, 2008
She speaks lolcat!
From: lagusta’s mom
To: lagusta
Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2008 9:54 PM
Subject: addiction
it izz adohrabell!
—– Original Message —-
From: lagusta
To: lagusta’s mom
Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2008 3:22 PM
Subject: addiction
Have I told you how addicted I am to this site?
http://icanhascheezburger.com/
So far J. has physically prevented me from creating my own captions of our own cats and sending them in, but it can’t be far off.
it’s so cold!
xo
L
we three January 23, 2008
One day, we just did it. You flew in late one night and we watched your plane descend from the beach, making its way out of the stars and flickering planets. Driving to the airport made our chests tighten just a little, knowing that in mere weeks we would be driving this same road in our clean jeans, jackets stuffed into our carry-on bags, our second home gone for another eleven months.
For days we’d been talking casually about the secret places we’d take you, surprised by our excitement at sharing the place we’d discovered together ten years ago. Neither of us had seen you in a few months, and it was exciting to anticipate your cute phrases and mannerisms. Our best couple-friend.
I hopped out of the car at the tiny terminal and saw you waiting for your bag, smiling haggardly with multiple vintage guitar and banjo cases, your clothes stuffed into the same green messenger bag you always bring to do laundry at our house. You were exhausted but I knew we’d stay up half the night snacking and gossiping.
The next day set the pattern: sleeping in, taco lunch, guilty tanning, surfing, swimming, guitars on the beach. Sunset walks while avoiding the frogs in the middle of our quiet street. A movie or book before bed. At night I cooked big lazy meals and you washed the dishes and we drank beer and talked about everything.
We talked about the music business and chocolate and anarchism and how to have a heart while trying to make a living. You asked us for advice about your band. We discussed buying land and building houses, debated the benefits of the bi-coastal lifestyle, shared experiences with the Master Cleanse (some, lots, and none). We listened to new favorite albums and critiqued drum sounds and vocal miking techniques, and I did a pretty good job at keeping up with the lingo.
When I felt jittery like I get when I don’t think I’m being productive enough I went to the little independent coffeehouse across from the beach you liked for its gentle surfing waves and caught up on email, did long-distance work for various volunteer projects, wrote long letters to friends with lavishly decorated envelopes, doodled in my journal, resisted the urge to pet pictures of my faraway cats, made overly optimistic but excitingly long lists of ways to improve my business, my interpersonal relations, my vocabulary, my anger, my activism, my heart.
We wandered off by ourselves, we ran races, we hiked without talking for long stretches. We walked on secluded beaches with our eyes closed, reaching our arms out for the safety each other’s bodies. We took pictures of each other taking pictures of each other. We shot movies of each other shooting movies of each other. Twice.
We had space for each other’s weaknesses: excessive blog posting, excessive self-taken pictures, excessive smoothie-drinking in lieu of meals. We made new friends and relentlessly gossiped about old ones. We winked at unruly kids at the next table at lunch, patted runaway dogs, muttered about the local chicken population when they woke us up at 4 AM, and held our breath to listen when we heard the wild pigs feasting on the fallen avocados outside our window at night.
* * *
In time, time passed, and now you’re on the West Coast going to Hollywood parties and planning your next tour and we’re on the East. Soon one of us will go to South to work on an album and the other will stay here and cook and hope for springtime.
Our non-vacation lives, we decided that day on the beach as the sun slipped away with turtles poking their heads out of the water everywhere, are really pretty livable. Weeks of vacation and lives dictated largely by our own passions. I nodded my head, too lulled by beauty to mumble about the unjust suffering my heart usually points out in order to exclude such sappy sentiments.
That night I was just thankful. I was able to accept that this beauty was necessary to face the ugliness I pride myself on facing and combating. It wasn’t the entirety of the meaning of life that night, and it didn’t take away my anger at the world and replace it with serenity and acceptance, but I didn’t want it to. I looked at your two faces and I was just thankful.
I (heart) Evan Kleiman January 22, 2008
One more food note: in case you’re looking for a great food podcast, my favorite is Evan Kleiman’s lovely Good Food, from Santa Monica.
The market report sometimes features (swoon) David Karp (and makes me – sitting in Upstate NY surrounded by squash and soft potatoes – lust for those gorgeous LA farmer’s markets), Evan is lively (without being irritatingly bubbly) and has great politics.
Best of all, she treats vegans like real people! It’s so heartrending. She even has these vegan dudes on once in a while, and while they definitely overuse veganaise and TVP (ick), and last week recommended using Baco Bits (yes, they are vegan), their recipe ideas are not half bad.
Yay for Evan Kleiman!
Michael Pollan is minting money, and good for him January 22, 2008
I listen to a lot of podcasts, and a lot of NPR. Therefore, I am constantly an unwilling witness to the tiring process of the “it” author/director/actor/chef/quirky ordinary person who makes the rounds of pretty much every single podcast and NPR program I listen to. All the food podcasts feature pretty much the same people, which is why I can now recite Judith Jones’ major anecdotes word for word. Losing her purse in Paris? Meeting Julia? The Anne Frank manuscript? Her mother’s last words? Bring it on, I’ll tell you all about it.
Michael Pollan is makin’ the rounds these days (as noted by Jenny S. below), and with good reason. He is a smart guy, and, as previously stated, I agree with 90% of what he says. But the more of his interviews I hear, the more I want to go crawl in an itunes-unequipped hole, because the fact that his new book is getting so much press means that Americans are, incredibly!, even more stupid than I had thought.
MiPo has written a book (pretty much) literally called: “Food is What Human Beings Should Eat: Read This Book and Learn All About The New Miracle Wonder Food, Called Food”
As he himself says in every single interview (and you can’t blame him, the questions are all the same too), all you need to know about “In Defense of Food” is the seven words on the back cover:
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
I hope he is laughing all the way to the bank. I sincerely congratulate him for figuring out a way to make good cash off the endlessly deep chasm of stupidity that is the modern American consumer. I’m not being cutsey – people really do need to hear his message. Let’s just be clear about this:
It’s so bad out there that we actually need a book to tell us to EAT FOOD.
3.5 tidbits January 18, 2008
Three miscellaneous bits:
1) I was writing a sweetly nasty note to the Omaha Steaks people demanding that they take me off their sickening mailing list today, and saw, to my utter horror, that their mailing address is “10909 John Galt Blvd.”
Oh holy fuck. The day has come. Here we go:
It is time to publicly pay whatever respects are due to Ayn Rand and move into a future in which I feel free to mock her and her insane followers.
I wish someone would publish an “Ayn Rand for Liberals” book that would leave out all the insane laissez-faire capitalist crap, the rape/sex scenes, and the rest of the misogyny, but would leave in all the parts about self-reliance, the idea of absolute right and wrong (which I deeply believe in – none of this Zen Buddhist stuff for me), and making your own furniture and all that. She said some good shit, but it is so often overshadowed by the shit shit.
When I fell in love with her books I was living in a scary situation in which someone telling me that my life was completely in my hands and could be whatever I wanted it to be was terribly alluring and possibly sanity-saving.
Thanks to a big-hearted, complicated, Ayn-Rand-loving ultra-liberal friend, I was introduced to her just at the right time (with just the right disclaimers).
Without a doubt, however, she was a non-feminist racist, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank her for what she has given me, wipe my brow in gratitude that my 17-year-old brain didn’t absorb the idiotic parts, and move on.
2) Moving on: The other day (5 time zones away, but still just two days ago) I was in the middle of a friendly argument with my Hillary-supporting father out-law (instead of in-law, get it? Um.).
We were debating the merits of being an idealist and remaining true to your ideals versus the merits of voting for someone who lost her ideals roughly twenty years ago and whose Iraq policies probably won’t be all that better than Bush’s, so there! Out of my mouth swam the following phrase, which I think is destined to become the new “We must be the change we wish to see in the world,” or at the very least the new “my karma ran over your dogma,” or something like that:
If all realists became idealists, reality would become ideal.
Yo!!! Do you love it?? I was literally (I think I am going to link to this blog literally every time I say literally, I adore it so) shocked by my zingy little aphorism, but no one at the table seemed all that amused/completely transformed in every way as I was. I brought it up again later, and a friend said that while I was without a doubt a) insane and b) a Zen master, he didn’t think it made all that much sense, because how can reality become ideal – won’t it then not be reality? I think he missed the whole point!
3) In case any blog-readers were considering buying Valentine’s Day truffles for their sweeties, I am probably going to be sold out of them in the next few days, so get your orders in now! Click here to read about the special secret Valentine’s Day truffle box! (I found an apprentice, though, don’t email me about that…)
3.5) In order to find the link for the secret boxes I did a Google search and found my own MySpace page, neglected by me for a month or so, with zillions of porny spams (and some nice comments) and…half in Japanese. Oh, internet!
things to throw/Shakespeare, he’s in the alley January 15, 2008
How cute are these little booklets?
They reminded me about something very strange I’ve been noticing lately:
Something seems to have shifted, flipped around totally actually, in my life in the past few years. It’s probably just that I’ve gotten a little bit older and more fearless combined with the fact that I rarely smile out in public (outside my house and made-up universe, what is there to smile at?), but one day I noticed that whereas I grew up feeling pretty much anxious and intimidated by everyone, all of the sudden people seemed to be a little intimidated by me. Not everyone of course, and of course not those people I really want to terrify (people like, you know – Bush), but some people. This is utterly bewildering to me and every time I think about my world turns upside down a little. Ugh – I don’t want to just become the reverse of what I used to be, I want to transcend definitions of what a confident person can be!
So when I saw these cute little booklets I thought – awesome! I can throw them at all the fuckers who ask me where I get my protein. Then I realized that no one really asks me that any more – actually what happens is that people apologize to me for eating animal protein! Perhaps this has to do with the circle I run with, or that the times have slightly changed, but I think I put out vegetarian fuck-off vibes that are a little scary. But still, the idea of throwing these at meaties is pretty tempting.*
Also tempting is singing Bright Eyes songs to the tune of Bob Dylan songs. Try it – seriously. “Lua” to the tune of “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” particularly cracks up my friends. “I knoooow that it is freeeezing, but I thiiiink we haaave to waaalk”…I’m a dork!
*While I’m at it, I should give a little shout out to Crafters for Critters – awesome handmade stuff to buy (including my truffles!), and 100% of the profits go to animal groups.
that’s what she said