resistance is fertile

living underground in the real world

New Yorker Whiteboy Watch: all of May 2008 June 27, 2008

Filed under: New Yorker whiteboy watch — lagusta @ 10:58 am

The NYerWbW is a regular feature whereby my mother and I keep track of the male/female breakdown in The New Yorker magazine. We include stats on the front section of short pieces (“Talk of the Town,” sometimes referred to as TotT) the main features section, the reviews section, (“The Critics”), poems and the cover. We do not include the male/female breakdown of the cartoons, but my educated guess is that it is usually 95% dudes. The “spots” have never, to my knowledge, been by a woman, and we don’t include them either. Why embark on such a random project? Click on the “New Yorker Whiteboy Watch” category link on the right and read through some of the older posts to get a sense of why it matters that a “general interest” magazine is written overwhelmingly by men (usually white ones).

May 5:

Talk of the Town: 2 women, 3 men, but the coveted first Talk of the Town piece, “Comment,” was by Dorothy Wickenden, a very rare sighting of a woman penning the “Comment.”

Lizzie Widdicombe continues to report on society goings on about town – I imagine her variously as a middle aged white woman who wears a lot of pantsuits and pearl necklaces, or exactly like Charlotte in Sex and the City, wearing fussy dresses and prissy pearl drop earrings. Either way, you know she wears pearls (and is white). (To my extreme joy, I could only remember two of the SATC women’s names – Miranda and Carrie – and had to resort to Google to remember the other two. It’s always so wonderful to find that pop culture hasn’t completely invaded and eroded one’s brain.)

Main features, poems, cover: 3 women, 10 men.

May 12:
I was excited to read the article on Grant Achatz and his infamous tongue cancer – truly, is there a more fascinating and heartbreaking and strange story? Brilliant chef at the top of his game gets tongue cancer and is told most of his tongue has to be cut out and he will never taste the same way again. Chef fights to save his tongue and undergoes insane chemo and radiation. The cancer seems to go into remission, but regaining his taste buds is a long road, and in the meantime he has to rely on sous chefs to remember his palate and cook like he would. Wow.

Like most chefs, I’m fascinated by the molecular gastronomy movement/trend, of which he is one of the most prominent American proponents. My personal interest is in creating a first rate traditional vegan cuisine focussed on traditional dishes from around the world, but I find molecular gastronomy fascinating in the way that a pilot might find an astronaut interesting – not exactly the job for me, a little bit disorienting, but interesting to read about in bed. He’s one of those people I’m happy are out there, and I sincerely hope he heals and continues creating beautifully strange dishes.

Also – we use the same induction stove!

(Obligatory vegan disclaimer: apparently Grant Achatz isn’t against foie gras, although he has worked with legendary anti-foie gras chef Charlie Trotter, but it does seem like his menus are pretty veg-friendly, so what can ya do.)

Moving on:

If Mariëtte Strik is a woman – Google can’t apparently confirm this – then this week marks the first week in my long recollection of a woman doing the “spots”!!! Glass ceiling smashed! Women can do adorable parenthetical tiny doodles too!

Overall, I kind of loved this issue. We got a Malcolm Gladwell, that great article on how smart parrots are, the bizarre photo retoucher dude – good stuff.

Talk of the Town: I guess I have to revise my whine about how women don’t usually write the first TotT piece, “Comment,” because last week it was by Dorothy Wickenden and this week it’s by the brilliant Elizabeth Kolbert. 3 women and 2 men contributed this week, woo!

Features/reviews/poetry/cover: 12 dudes/3 dudettes.

May 19:

Talk of the Town: 2 women, 3 men, including, of course The Widdicombe.

Features/reviews/poetry/cover: 3 women, 11 men.

May 26:

Talk of the Town: 1 woman, 4 men, no Lizzie (but Lauren, but she’s good)!

Features/reviews/poetry/cover: 4 ladies, 13 mens.

Was Woody Allen’s fiction ever funny to people like me, people who loved Manhattan and Annie Hall but can’t really love Woody Allen himself? I wonder. I’ve never been able to get into it.

 

Crossroads, nonviolence, and the Green Party June 25, 2008

Filed under: culture and its discontents,new paltz,politics — lagusta @ 11:06 am

So, in our little local Green Party we have this nutjob dude, Bill Mulcahy (I care not at all if he finds this post, so I see no reason not to use his full name), who is a known homophobe (when our town was getting lots of media attention for our mayor marrying same-sex couples in 2004, he was very public about his opposition to gay marriage) as well as a lightly racist, classist xenophobe who wants to save the planet for, apparently, white upper-middle-class people. I can’t stand him, and am angry beyond belief that he won’t go away. He only agrees with the GP on one issue – environmentalism – but because we are “the green party” (but we’re not, we’re The Green Party – there is a giant difference) he can’t understand why we don’t just work on environmentalism (racists aren’t all that smart) and shut up about all this equality bullshit.

As regular readers of this fine blog know (read older posts from this month if you’re in the sad position of not being a regular reader), Crossroads is the hot issue in the New Paltz Green Party at the moment. He keeps sending these annoying emails to our listserve all about how we are “infiltrated by the Democrats” because we are not all quitting our jobs and devoting our lives to making sure that this giant development doesn’t happen in our town.

Here’s his latest email and my response to it. His email isn’t all that bad, but coming as it does in an endless line of emails in the same vein that are always so harsh and aggressive and just plain annoying when we are all trying so hard to have a nuanced discussion of the issue – oh GRRR, I just can’t take it anymore.

(more…)

 

The feminist mystique June 22, 2008

Filed under: i heart feminists,self-titled — lagusta @ 1:24 pm

My sweetheart and I have been together for eleven years, since we were 18 and 19, so we’ve become adults together. Because I was immersed in hardcore feminist theory throughout college and went to work at a hardcore “second-wave” lesbiany feminist restaurant after college, it’s of course been important to me that my  relationship takes into account the basic tenants of feminism 101 – if I cook, you will do the dishes, etc.

Happily, I am lucky (or entitled!) enough not to really have to worry about these things – my sweetheart was brought up by a truly fierce mother and two fiery sisters, and this combined with his innate sense of fairness has meant that there is nothing I can teach him about women being true equals of men in every way. Even more happily, he still lifts the heavy stuff. And, though he sometimes laughs about the fact that his thumb and pinkie can encircle my wrist with room leftover, he doesn’t respect me any less because of my pencil arms. We’ve struck a good balance.

Still, though. Every heterosexual raging feminist woman has those moments where she doesn’t know if the fact that her partner* never wipes down the sink after brushing his teeth is because of patriarchy, his DNA, or a combination of the two, and moreover, should it even matter?

At what point does our household transition from a “patriarchy is ingrained thus I will never wash your laundry, even when I’m doing a half load of my clothes and you’re going on tour tomorrow and have no clean underwear” point of view to a “I just realized that we’ve been together eleven years and I’ve never cleaned the cat boxes – does this mean that the feminist revolution is complete?” kind of a thing?

Or wait, was that the same thing? I guess what I’m saying is that it took me a little while to not feel weird when I found myself washing my partner’s clothes and such. He has absolutely no problem washing my clothes if I am running out of time and going away the next day and he has free time, so why should I feel weird when things are reversed? Of course, the answer is patriarchy. It’s OK to feel weird, and to think about it, but it’s important to me that I don’t look at my relationship as “heterosexual relationship – be on constant patriarchy alert!!” and instead see it as “Lagusta and Jacob, living their lives together, helping each other out all that they can.” Two people who decide for themselves what is fair, and fun, and what makes sense.

And though in my particular relationship I have to admit that I am both cleaner and tidier than my sweetheart for the most part (the exception being that he can’t leave the house without making the bed, and I have never made a bed in my life), I know many relationships in which this is not the case – I seem to know a strangely large number of painfully, painstakingly clean men.

All of the above facts make the very strange experience I had last week even stranger. Said sweetheart and I took a quickie vacation to Nova Scotia, where his mother recently bought an old house she is fixing up as a vacation home. After dinner the first night (made by me), I noticed that the dishes (done by him) in the dish drainer were greasy.

“Hey, what’s up with the dishes?” I said.

“Oh, I couldn’t find the dish soap. But there was enough soap on the sponge to wash them.”

“Hmm. That’s weird. The dishes are totes oily, yo.”

“AHHHHHH!!! DON’T SAY TOTES!!!!” (Jacob absolutely hates “totes,” which is why it slips out around him constantly.)

“So, did you look for dish soap?”

“Yep, I couldn’t find any.”

Now. Jacob’s mother has several weird kitchen-related weirdnesses (not eating salt being one, subsisting on nothing but lentils and tempeh and olive oil for the past thirty years being another) but I doubted that washing dishes without soap was one of them. Puzzled, I opened the cabinet under the sink – i.e., the place where everyone in the world keeps their dish soap if they don’t keep it on the counter. There was a big bottle of all-natural dish soap sitting right there.

Friends.

This little tableau took place about a week ago, but it is safe to say that I have not stopped thinking about it since.  Here are the facts of the case:

1) The dishes were totes still oily. “There was enough soap on the sponge to wash them”? What is that about?

2) We keep our dish soap under the sink at home!!

3) When presented with the above two facts, instead of slapping his forehead and saying “What was wrong with me last night? How weird!” Jacob simply said “Ah. There it is.”

What does this mean? It’s wrapping my mind into a pretzel! My beloved feministy sweetheart, my pairbond, my helpmate, my best friend, my mind reader – in the episode of the oily dishes you are a completely foreign person to me, someone whose moves and motives and thought processes are so completely alien I can do nothing but stare at you in open-mouthed wonder. Were you tired from a long day of relaxing by the sea? Did the salty clean Canadian air cloud your mind? Is it because the tomatoes in the pasta sauce we had for dinner were not organic?

These moments are the weird ones in the standard feminist relationship – the ones where you see that though your sweetheart knows better than you do when your period is due, there is a centuries-long backlog of synapses and brain waves hidden in our brains that will sometimes pop out unbidden, utterly blowing our modern minds. It’s those hidden, half-buried impulses that led to the oily dishes, and it’s my latent, unacknowledged housewifey impulses that led to me being so amazed by it.

I don’t want to say that I know no woman who would leave the dishes oily and wouldn’t think to look under the sink, but let’s just say that I know many more women who would share my open-mouthed wonder at this little episode than would have not found the soap.

Phew. I’m glad I wrote about it so I can stop thinking about it.

Do you know what’s dorky, Jacob? Wearing the t-shirt of the band you tour with. Do you know what’s dorky, Lagusta? Wearing the t-shirt of a band you’ve publicly made fun of. My god.

*Yes, we are those dorks who introduce each other as “partner” – that’s what we are! Life partners, although “life partner” is too dorky even for us. My friend Selma thinks we should call each other what bird mates are called – pairbonds. It’s cute, but a bit nonsensical, no? My problem is that I can’t bring myself to say “boyfriend.” To me, a boyfriend is someone you share a milkshake with two straws with while looking into each other’s eyes, not the person with whom you trade two lawn mows for two cat box cleanings.

 

my playground June 21, 2008

Filed under: cooking is vegan (of course) — lagusta @ 12:39 am

Shameless fun alert! For no reason at all except my own excitement, here are photos of my new commercial kitchen in Rosendale, New York, exactly 10 miles from my house. (Because my holier-than-thou status is seriously in danger with a 20-mile commute per day, I am saving for an electric scooter – look at this cool vintage-looking one!)

After cooking in cramped, inadequate spaces for years by myself and working in horrible, dudey, often filthy restaurant kitchens for years before that, having my own clean and well lit space is incredibly luxurious. Ignoring all the standard restaurant kitchen rules (the first of which seems to be “ugliness is key to productivity”) and organizing according to how I cook and what kind of space I want to spend many hours a day in has been great fun.

Not pictured: back storage space (nothin’ special) and freezers, the bathroom, the other bathroom (neither very pretty), and the compost bins out back.

(Sorry for the amazingly ugly way these pictures are arranged. I completely screwed this post up – I’m a cook, not a professional blogger! Click on the thumbnails to see the bigger pix, then click on the pictures again to see the whole thing.)

 

veganic farming is the best farming June 18, 2008

Filed under: cooking is vegan (of course),politics — lagusta @ 2:09 pm

When I moved to New Paltz, I naturally sought out all the best farmers. One of the best of the best is Huguenot Street Farm. They are entirely veganic, meaning that they do not use any animal byproducts (factory farm manure, fish meal, blood, bones) to amend their soil. It’s something vegans don’t often think about, but the more you think about it, the more veganic-grown vegetables make sense.

Obviously it’s better to buy local organic or certified naturally grown veggies rather than cross-country (or cross-continent) veganic vegetables (I don’t really think most veganic farms ship their veggies, though), but if I have a choice between vegetables from a farm with no animals and one with pretty cows and chickens, I’ll always choose the veganic one. There are some wonderful, smart, caring farmers in New Paltz (hello Pete Taliaferro – that’s actually his farm in that picture, in truth it is prettier than Huguenot Street Farm, and it is on my weekly bike route – hello Jay Armour), but I like making a game of how pure I can be, and in my book, spilled blood – however gently it is spilled and however nice the animals’ lives were before their blood was spilled – is incompatible with pure food.

Aside from that complex ethical issue, of course, there are very real dangers associated with non-veganic veggies. Because CNN.com says they are going to take it offline in 30 days, I will copy and post this article about veganic farming here. It mentions Kate and Ron, the farmers behind Huguenot Street Farm.

(Thanks to my client LJ for forwarding the article to me!)

(more…)

 

hot hot heat June 17, 2008

Filed under: culture and its discontents,self-titled — lagusta @ 2:44 pm

It’s hot.

Heat always reminds me of growing up, and I am thankful to be an adult all over again. I grew up in a constantly hot place, and I now live in a place where heat is a seasonal thing.

In the hot place, there was a vague sense that the prevalence of white Christmas wishes and orangey falling leaves in the national culture was slightly discriminatory, but the minute I left for college on the other side of the country I instantly understood the wisdom of living in a place with seasons. I completely grasped why people who have always lived with seasons can’t imagine not having them: it’s completely unnatural to live in a perennial inferno (Yes, people say that the hot place has seasons, but the monsoon season is the only one they can ever point to besides the inferno season, and since that only lasts a few weeks I don’t think it counts. Some people even say there is a winter in the hot place, and yes, some mornings walking to school I was indeed “cold,” in the way that only children raised in the hot place could be cold in 50 degree mornings. By eleven AM, however, everyone’s “jackets” – long sleeved shirts, usually – would be crammed into backpacks and the heat waves would start and the distance would get all squiggly.) People shouldn’t live in the hot place. It’s obviously environmentally unsustainable to live in a place that could not exist without air conditioning.

The thing about the hot place is that no one really ever thought to complain about it. I knew not to walk on asphalt during the hottest part of the day because my sneakers would get gooey tar on them, and I knew not to wear jeans for nine months of the year unless I desired the sensation of calf sweat running into my slouchy socks. I don’t ever remember being hot in the sense that people here in upstate New York are hot, where the heat is like a mosquito biting – annoying, something to escape, to whine about. In the hot place, heat was just air.

The endless heat was apiece with the many immutable facts of my childhood – poverty and fear and deep scary weirdnesses. Recently I was telling a friend that when I was growing up, the idea of renovating a kitchen or a bathroom was completely foreign. Everything that was would always be, nothing could be changed. I would come home from school to find crackheads running a neighborhood laundromat from our washing machine for pocket change, my father would be waving a gun at a drunk ex-friend who would be stumbling backwards out the door, and the stark treeless desert heat would be beating down endlessly. Resignation was the thing.

Then I moved thousands of miles away. Now intense heat is fleeting, I can save up money to replace my cracked kitchen floor, and I haven’t seen anyone pull a gun in a fight in years.

Thus, heat waves are a sweet private reminder of the glorious nature of seasons, and how lucky I am to be in this quiet calm green place to witness them.

 

crossroads redux June 17, 2008

Filed under: new paltz — lagusta @ 2:37 pm

Since my Crossroads freakout (see below), I have done a lot of reading, thinking, listening, and talking talking talking about the project. Here are the facts of the case as I now see them (please note that this post is of no interest whatsoever to anyone but New Paltzers [New Paltzians?]):

-New Paltz is growing. More people want to live here than can afford to live here (I often include myself in that category) and there is a serious affordable housing shortage.

-We live in a capitalist system, and this land is looking for a buyer (or leaser? I am not sure). Though I am not a capitalist, I recognize that under capitalism the town cannot reject every idea a property owner has for developing his or her property forever. Something is going to go in that spot eventually whether we like it or not, so let’s work on liking it.

-Crossroads is a pretty dense development in that because it is a mixed-use project, it will cluster a good amount of housing with office space (ideally – this has not yet been firmed up), restaurants and shops, thus (again, ideally, I’m not convinced this will truly happen) cutting down on car usage. It could be argued that this is better than lots of the vile little ticky-tacky McMansiony developments that seem to spring up overnight – clustering people with the things people need (i.e., the way a city does) is absolutely a better environmental choice than the way a suburb operates.

-However, it could also be argued that Crossroads will create a shitty version of downtown New Paltz with chain stores and shit restaurants instead of locally-owned businesses and restaurants. It does not appear to me that the housing is going to be affordable enough that the people working in the shit restaurants and shit chain stores will be able to afford to live there.

-There is some talk on the Crossroads site that “energy-star appliances” will be used – but where’s the real commitment to environmental sustainability? If Crossroads was all LEED-certified and all that, with composting toilets and low-e windows and the whole shebang, then it truly could be an asset to the community.

-Apparently, 20 or so acres of the 57-acre project (so, half of that big black blob up there) will be permanently preserved as open space.

With these thoughts in mind, the New Paltz Green Party is going to be circulating a petition stating that the citizens of NP are in favor of the Crossroads development only if five conditions are met. The petition should be finished in the next day or so, and when it is I will post it here so my myriad NP readers can download and disseminate it.

(Thanks to Dresser Johnson for the Crossroads graphic)

 

my contractually-obligated post about oprah and veganism June 13, 2008

Filed under: cooking is vegan (of course),culture and its discontents,New Yorker whiteboy watch — lagusta @ 1:32 am

In truth I know very little about Oprah, but it’s my understanding that out in the real world she is something of a big deal and therefore I’m supposed to be all excited about her dipping a toe into vegan waters. Instead of summoning up some thoughts on this, I have a feeling that this post over at brownfemipower expresses mostly everything I would express if I knew more about the “issue,” so there you go.

Also, Vegans of Color have a great response to a related post of hers as well. Good stuff.

PS: Is anyone wondering where New Yorker Whiteboy stats are? I am six New Yorkers behind, so just wonder a little longer…

 

taken by trees June 12, 2008

Filed under: new paltz — lagusta @ 2:30 am

Oh that? Just some trees. Well, trees I own. You know, if I believed in that sort of thing. Trees I own in the sense that they are safe for their entire lives – that kind of ownership. My sweetheart and I and any nearby friend we can stuff into the car have been visiting our gorgeous 20 acres every week or so since we acquired them, and it’s safe to say that my tentative little crush has blossomed into heart-palpitatingly tingly full-blown love.

I don’t get it.

We’ve owned our house and its one-acre lovely world of hilly trees and flowers for four years now, and though I do definitely love my house, I’m not in love with it, and never have been. I don’t think about the house when my mind wanders, and wonder what’s happening with the frogs and the turtles, the newts, birds, deer, the teeny cemetery, the nettles, the crumbling rock wall, the shack, and the thousands upon thousands of shades of green.

I enjoy watching the trees outside my bedroom window as they change with the seasons, but the transformation of our 20 acres seems intensely magical to me. Why? Maybe because I can’t believe that it’s all mine.

But maybe it has something to do with the fact that I first saw our house in May with all the peonies in bloom, and knew we would be best friends, just like that. Our house is pretty, I like pretty, the deal was done.

I first saw the land in a raw December, when we couldn’t cross the stream to explore all of it and I mostly stood in one place and stamped my feet and gazed around at all the bare trees, bare ground, and the little corner with the old old cemetery and its harsh cold stones. In my mind that was the land – cold and bare. Good to have, romantic and lovely, and definitely exciting, but at that time I was more in love with the idea of the land than the place itself.

Then spring came along, and (really, there is no other way to put it:) stole my heart.

I spent the first eighteen years of my life in a seasonless southwestern hellscape, and maybe that’s my excuse for always forgetting that little trick about winter: it goes away. Winter – these 12 winters I’ve irritatingly weathered – enters my bones so shockingly and completely that when I look at a winter landscape I can’t possibly imagine any beauty to it at all – the stark raw kind that people who like winter can appreciate, or any other kind.

Which, of course, explains why springtime is such a giant gift each year. This year has brought the extra giant gift of the land, getting to drive the five-minute idyllic drive along the river past the sheep and horses and tromping along, peering at this and that, watching everything unfold and unfurl and shoot up. My grandfather was a naturalist, and although I never met him, for the first time I feel like his granddaughter.

Every week the land seems completely different, and if I don’t go for two weeks in a row I can barely find my way around. It’s so rare that we are forced to find our way with no human-made markers to guide us, and I’m enjoying getting to know each cornerstone – the big rock, the twisted tree, the fallen log you can use to cross the stream.

We’re not going to do anything with the land for a long time. I’m happy about that. I want to spend huge chunks of time just feeling feeling my way around, watching it go to sleep and come back again, again and again.

 

crossroads = cross bones style June 11, 2008

Filed under: new paltz,stop consuming so fucking much — lagusta @ 2:06 am

Mushroom forays: just one of the ten zillion awesome things about open space that will be destroyed because of a giant 57-acre useless crap development project coming your way ASAP.

Dear everyone I know in New Paltz, NY:

Have you heard about the Crossroads monstrosity? I am completely absolutely 100% not exaggerating when I say that the more I learn about it the more I truly believe that it will kill all that we love about New Paltz – trees, open space and animal habitats, small businesses, decent-looking buildings that don’t make us start singing that “ticky-tacky houses” song under our breath to control our rage at what endgame capitalism hath wrought.

If this hell project goes ahead, when you come off the Thruway exit you will be greeted with a 57-acre puke festival of chain restaurants, a giant hotel, crappy apartments (I pity the people living there who are sentenced to breathing Thruway air all the time!), and horrid mall stores. Truly, cross bones style.

I won’t let this happen to our lovely little town – are you with me?

Much love,
Lagusta
More info on Crossroads:

The Crossroads at New Paltz is a development proposal in the Town of New Paltz sited off of Paradies Lane, on the site where Walmart was proposed more than a decade ago [That idea was throughly trounced, and we have the book to prove it] . This mixed use project on 57.25 acres will include 103,340 square feet of retail and office, a 120-room hotel, a 10,000-square-foot restaurant, and 250 residences. The complete Draft Environmental Impact Statement was made available to the public on June 4, 2008. The public hearing is scheduled for Monday June 23, 2008 @ 7:30 PM in Town Hall. The Town Planning Board is the Lead Agency for the SEQR review.

The project does not conform to any of the underlying zoning. Late last year, the Town Board modified their Planned Unit Development (PUD) Zoning, which enabled The Crossroads to apply for a PUD. The current zoning is highway business and light industrial. The development footprint is 25 acres.

Thus there are 2 weeks to review and prepare comments prior to the public hearing. The document is available online from www.townofnewpaltz.org where you can scroll down on the home page until you find the link to the DEIS. It is multiple volumes and hundreds of pages.

 

 
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 68 other followers