resistance is fertile

living underground in the real world

meat is(n’t?) murder (also: buy my pins!) September 30, 2008

Filed under: cooking is vegan (of course),stop consuming so fucking much — lagusta @ 9:43 pm

I’ve always had a fondness for the old school “meat is murder” slogan. It inspired my own “don’t eat death,” which I favor these days for its directness and and because I came up with it.  I just came across this blog post about MiM, however (I think I found it through Vegans of Color?). Wow – I had to read it, like, three times before I even understood what she was talking about – my brain is mad atrophied, yo. While I’m off picking blackberries and thinking about chocolate and taking pictures of cupcakes, it’s great that someone is using their noodle.

I finally get the point (“murder” refers to unlawful killing), and while I think it’s an interesting one and makes sense if you’re a super stickler, I’m not totally convinced.

However, speaking of meat, did you know that I sell a very cute set of three vegan propaganda pins? I mentioned it a while ago, but they are still hanging around, so I thought I’d bring it up again.

They are sold in a set of 3 different pins:
one 1.25″ “Don’t eat death” pin with a lovely drawing of a fish:

one 1″ “cows died for your sins” pin with a picture of a hamburger in the background (above).

one 1″ “don’t eat death” pin with a lovely drawing of a spoon and fork (those weird squiggly lines aren’t as visible on the pin as they are in this image!)


Each one is affixed to a page from a weird old book called “Races of England” that I thought deserved to be torn up, and comes in a jaunty plastic bag. The pins are only $3 for a set of 3 (plus $2 postage!)!

I only have a few more sets, so why don’t you buy some so I can sell out and have an excuse to make up some more? It’s fun. Click here to be taken to PayPal to buy them.

 

Monday Miscellany – the long and boring edition September 30, 2008

Filed under: cooking is vegan (of course),Monday Miscellany,NYC,Restaurant rants and raves,Upstate NY — lagusta @ 1:54 am

“Poke my cheek with a pencil! Harder!!”

Election year blues continues, but in the meantime, here are 3.5 random distractions from the ridiculousness:

1) I have found my own personal perfect beverage: Fizzy Lizzy Grapefruit. I’ve been drinking it for a few years, always feeling guilty because it is packaged (just a glass bottle and a cardboard carton, not the worst), not organic, and shipped (but it seems that maybe it’s made in NY? I can’t really figure it out). But I always go back, and since I did the math and realized that my wholesale cost is less than $1 each, I indulge in about one a day – this feels super indulgent for a frugal gal like me who thinks of bottled drinks as luxuries.

At every Fancy Food Show I make it a point to taste all the fizzy juice drinks (Izzy, GUS, etc.), and nothing compares to my beloved Fiz Liz. (At Bloodroot, where it’s a bestseller, the employees secretly call it Fizzy Lezzy). I also really like this ballsy page comparing the different fizzy sodas with Mz. Liz – I’m thinking about doing the same for my business, to really show people why my little company is so much better than, well, anything else, anywhere, ever. (Oh, I can’t link directly to the page – click on “Compare Us.”)

While doing some research on Fizzy Lizzy recently, I saw this in a NY Times piece: “Fizzy Lizzy is the kitchen staff’s house drink at Blue Hill at Stone Barns.”

1.5) (Ha! Could BHSB possibly get any more publicity? What they are doing is admittedly awesome, and friends of mine have had perfectly lovely dinners there, but the whole place irks the fuck out of me in that special way that super Slow Foodie things can be so irksome. Give any chef, not just the anointed Dan Barber, a zillion dollars and a magnificent parcel of land, and she will build an amazing restaurant on it, I promise you. And while they absolutely deserve praise for only cooking what they grow, I hate to break it to every major and minor media outlet in the area, if not the country, but, um, oodles of restaurants – and vegan meal delivery services! – do pretty much the same thing, just without all the bells and whistles (= star chefs, Rockefellers, and P.R. agents). Yes, most don’t do it to the obsessive extent that they do but…oh, nevermind. Just thinking about them is tiring. (Also, I shouldn’t really talk smack about the Rockefellers – they bought many hundreds of dollars’ worth of my truffles last year. Thank you, Rockefellers, and please remember Lagusta’s Luscious for your holiday party needs this year!)

Also, I emailed them (Blue Hill at Stone Barns, not the Rockefellers) to make a reservation recently, but knowing how insane they are about seasonability and fearing a dinner of micro zucchini steamed with nothing on it but salt because they don’t use olive oil or something (or this ridiculous-looking creation, OY VEY! This is what everyone I know snacks on between lunch and dinner – good honest CSA-fresh veggies. Something about the pomposity of calling it “vegetables on a fence” makes me want to poke my eyes out with those nails, do you feel me?), I straight up asked: is it worth it for two upstate vegans, one a chef herself, both of whom know all about the bounties of Hudson Valley produce, to come for dinner? Do they, perhaps, do innovative things with house-fermented tempeh or anything else that might be interesting to my particular demographic? I asked all this very politely, because I do respect them and did feel I should see the damn place for myself since it was inspiring such orgasmic outbursts of p.c. purple prose from the foodie press. But I wasn’t up for paying triple digits for a dinner of the same veggies I get from farmers every week prepared by people with no understanding of the vagaries of vegan cuisine. They very promptly and kindly responded: they don’t grow soybeans, so I will be treated to a 100% vegetable meal. I’m sure it would have been a very nice meal, but I declined.*)

Well, anyway, Fizzy Lizzy is also the official house drink at Lagusta’s Luscious. Veronica – drink freely!

2) My Sula cat would be the happiest dude in the world if I would hold a super sharp pencil or knitting needle out so he could rub his cheeks super hard against it over and over again, turning his head each time to get a symmetrical face full o’ pencil points. He is adamant about only getting poked one time before prissily turning the other cheek, so to speak. Sometimes I try to sneak two passes with the pencil on one side, but he just stares at me like I’m deranged. Trying to explain to him that it is so clearly the other way around doesn’t help, and this is why I so adore Sula. He lives in a world completely of his own making, governed by his own unbreakable rules. Sneezing so freaks him out that he will flee for hours if you sneeze too near him, but if you whistle in the right key he will run toward you and you can engage him in an endless jazzy call-and-response meow/whistle song that will have him dancing and purring with delight. Have you ever heard of a cat that comes when you whistle at him?

I have lived with this cat for almost ten years, but there are entire parts of Sula’s brain I will never understand. He is also, it must be admitted, utterly unphotogenic. I’m actually tempted to post photos of his showboaty sister Noodle instead, because she loves a camera like nothing else.

I’ve been thinking about little Sula a lot because he will be ten on Thursday. He shares a birthday with Gandhi and Gillian Welch, how nice is that? In truth, we arbitrarily decided to make his birthday World Vegetarian Day, though he is not himself a vegetarian. He lives up to the Gandhi part of the day well, though, being the resident rebel of our house. And it must be noted that he has a most mellifluous meow, though it is not quite as nice as Gillian’s voice.

(And now he clearly has sensed me thinking about him: he just jumped up on the desk with that particular meow that sounds just like an elongated “hello!” and means “come to bed!”)

3) My god, I am becoming a cat blogger. Moving on, hastily: I’m not going to take the credit for Sweet & Sara’s rising star in the vegan culinary landscape, but the facts of the case are these:

Several years ago, a sweet girl named Sara was making marshmallows and things for Candle Café and other NYC restaurants. I met her when I catered a Carol Adams reading at Mooshoes, the vegan shoe store in NYC. (I also met the great Jen Mazer that day, who went on to design my gorgeous website.) She said that she was thinking of trying to get some distribution for her marshmallows and other sweets, and I got very excited and told her she pretty much owed it to the vegan world to do so. There were no vegan-owned companies making marshmallows, just the Kosher ones you used to be able to get around Passover until they started using fish gelatin, a brand of utterly horrific vegan marshmallows I will not name, and Tiny Trapeze, who make tasty vegan and not vegan marshmallows.

A while later, I heard through the vegan grapevine that she jumped into the deep waters of large-scale production and distribution (well, I’m sure she is actually pretty small-scale in the scheme of things, but compared with my happy little micro-business, where making 1000 truffles is a major undertaking, she got big fast) and now I see her stuff everywhere. Little by little, people are realizing that they don’t have to eat marshmallows made from the collagen of tortured animals, and for that I thank Sara Sohn.

____________

*Actually, why don’t I just copy and paste the email exchange?

On Aug 30, 2007, at 6:11 PM, lagusta’s luscious wrote:

Hello!

I was hoping to come to dinner at BHSB, and was wondering if you could do a nice meal for two that is vegan. My partner and I have been to many fancy restaurants – per se, Charlie Trotter’s, etc. that specialize in vegetarian tasting menus, and while the meals are always lovely they are also always 100% vegetables. I’m a vegan chef in New Paltz, NY, where I am blessed with many great local farms to choose from, and I have to say that an amuse bouche of heirloom tomatoes and vinaigrette isn’t exactly what I’m looking to pay $100 for, as lovely as heirloom tomatoes are…it’s just that that’s what I eat all day long. I hope this doesn’t sound too bossy, but I’m just wondering if we request a vegan meal if it will be 100% vegetables, or if there will be interesting things with soy foods, nuts, etc?

Best,
Lagusta

Hello,
I understand your dilemma! We are also a working farm and very proud of the vegetables that we grow.   Unfortunately we don’t work with soy products and nuts, so our vegan menu does feature all vegetable items.  I apologize for not being able to be more accommodating.  Have you tried Pure Food and Wine in the city?

Sincerely,

Philippe Gouze
General Manager
Blue Hill at Stone Barns
630 Bedford Road
Pocantico Hills, NY 10591

 

psychic hearts September 28, 2008

Filed under: culture and its discontents,self-titled — lagusta @ 12:25 am

Let’s pretend that the natural world heals all wounds, OK?

For a while there today I was traipsing around the woods with the Mid-Hudson Mycological Association peeps and I felt that things were going to be just fine. I was correctly identifying mushrooms right and left and all seemed right with the universe. All the pretty leaves even made me feel a little bad for saying that I fucking hated fall yesterday.

But life is not Walden Pond, and we don’t all have rich (pencil-factory-ownin’, if I recall correctly) daddies who will finance our trips into the peaceful woods – oh, the luxuries of transcendental meditation. My daytrip to the woods was just that, and afterward I had to go to the bank and the Asian market and the whole thing, that Saturday swirl of commerce and cars. I decided a long time ago to live in and patch up this battered world, instead of frolicking around in my own head in a little cabin on a pond.

I often regret this choice – action over intellectualism, realities of poverty and injustices over romantic ideals – but I know it was the right choice. I was once a mighty fine academic, but one day while walking through the quad and wondering just exactly how Lacan’s analysis of the inherently unstable nature of language itself was such a victory for feminism, as my professors seemed to believe it was, I made a choice to live in the world. I loved Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. I loved Toni Morrison and Adrienne Rich, conjugating French verbs and scrutinizing perfect iambic pentameter blank verse. But language games will never bring about revolution, no matter how ardently WST 101 professors deeply believe in them. And since I was about twelve I’ve known that my business was to be the business of revolution.

So today I live in the world. And the world hurts my heart so badly.

But mushrooms. So pretty. The poetry of their Latin names give me goosebumps, and the idea of a mycelium – that mushrooms are the fruits of vast underground networks that are constantly breathing and expanding right under our feet – thinking about the world wrapped in its skin of mycelium is deeply calming, isn’t it? Do you know about mycoremediation? Mushrooms, quite literally, are cleaning up the world we have so badly damaged.

But after the mushrooms comes errands, and work, and while making the tempeh and peeling potatoes I watched the series finale of M*A*S*H. And I know, I know, don’t say it – I’m a softie. I try to cover it up with a lot of “fucks,” and sometimes I’m able to transform the heartache the world gives me into cleansing, purifying, motivating anger, but after M*A*S*H tonight I just slid down onto the kitchen floor and cried.

War, people.

How can the human brain adequately wrap itself around the concept of war? I know, I know – I’m being overly sincere and a little ridiculous. But seriously. Not just war, and yes, I know M*A*S*H was a sappy TV show, but: war.

M*A*S*H depicts the Korean war but everyone knows it’s really about Vietnam. Both useless wars, (if you subscribe to the idea that there can be useful wars, which I don’t, of course, but clearly especially Vietnam was doubly and triply useless in the scale of things), both indescribably heartbreaking. M*A*S*H would have been heartrending enough if wars had ended there, but what got me down tonight was this: how can my heart have space to feel sad about these fictional characters in a real war, when my heart is made almost unbearably heavy just thinking about the war(s) taking place right now?

How much sorrow can one heart hold?

I’m not trying to be dramatic or annoyingly softhearted here, but the truth is that I’ve always felt I lacked some essential membrane that helps people move about in the world without it just eating them up. Most people pretend to at least have a protective coating that allows them to swim through the world without the assorted horrors of life – homeless people, starvation, everyday cruelty – paralyzing them. I’m able to do that for stretches, but then I have stretches like this, where the real world drags my heart down so far I have to literally sit on the floor for a while.

War, and economic meltdowns, and even everyday heartbreaks like the Saturday night bar scene in my town – for some reason it just breaks my heart. The essential brokenness at the heart of America right now, something like that.

And again: mushrooms. Old as the universe, they just keep on popping up. Some of them will kill you, but I had a few boletes for dinner tonight that were, well, poetry on the tongue. Transcendental, actually. And the push and pull starts all over again – beauty versus truth, and trying to mix the two up in your head just to make it a little easier to get through the day. I’ve rambled on about it before, you must be tired of it. But that’s what my life turns on when everything gets so heavy: balancing the pleasures of the material world with the horrors.

Things are pretty unbalanced right now, but I’m holding onto things like mushrooms and mycelium and M*A*S*H and hoping and waiting and working hard. What else is there to do?

 

baron von bullshit September 26, 2008

Filed under: culture and its discontents,new paltz,politics — lagusta @ 1:53 pm

I guess someone got tired of the big companies having all the fun: my little local Wachovia bank just got robbed! Right on Main Street, in midday! I was just in there yesterday, wow.

 

i could live in hope (but I don’t) September 26, 2008

Filed under: politics,self-titled — lagusta @ 1:43 pm

This is how it goes.

Rainy day. Leaves falling.

It smells like fall, and you fucking hate fall.

No inquiries for new clients, even though September is usually your busiest month. You’re worried, and not doing a good job of hiding it. You love your life. You want it to continue.

Get up, brush teeth, feed the cats, listen to NPR. Your resolve to get done what you need to get done crumbles as you listen to the news of this old crumbling world, suddenly so, so old and crumbling at such a fast pace.

Go into town, get a bagel with peanut butter and jelly and chamomile tea at the nice café. Sit at the counter between two dudes. Read The New Yorker while you eat, because you know if you open your computer and start working on paperwork you will start reading websites about what’s happening, and you want to prolong that as long as possible.

The dude on your right – Jewish or Italian, undoubtedly from Long Island, Brooklyn or The Bronx, with a big Klinger nose and a deep Noo Yawk voice and a Westchester sweatshirt – starts chatting with the counter guy about economics, which he (hello college town) used to teach. Counter guy doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, but for some reason I do, and I jump in, saying that I see the problem being that we’re handing a ton (literally) of money to the very people who got us into this situation and expecting them to magically get us out of it with absolutely no regulation and then we have people like McCain who just months ago said he wants to “open up” health care exactly like he helped to “open up” the markets and…and the guy says, “Yeah, that’s a good point, but you know, that hasn’t passed yet, and I don’t think Congress is going to sell us out like that…”

And we start talking about it. And the guy on the other side – whiteness of an undetermined background, tall, family-man type dude, wearing a fisherman’s sweater and nice jeans – jumps in, and mentions that he has to go to Pennsylvania for work every few days, and he’s been putting in a few hours at Obama offices in whatever town he’s in, and he’s been making calls for Obama at home, and how we can do so too by getting lists from his website and making calls from home, and “they have special lists for women to talk to other women” and and and.

And it’s nice, because these dudes are the kind of blah Democrats that have good hearts and are honest mainstreamy late baby boomer dudes but aren’t exactly political in the way that you are political, and it’s nice to see them all engaged and shit. And it’s clear that they are educated, in a certain way, and smart, in a certain way, and trying really really hard to figure out the best way to save our country from McCain.

And you have things to add to the conversation – witty, educated, smart things – but they don’t really look at you when you’re talking, but you don’t really expect them to. They think of themselves as the experts and you as some random weird jaded girl chiming in because you’re sitting between them. You know this is partly because of patriarchy and party because you’re wearing striped tights and polka dot rain boots and your hair is up in two buns like Princess Leia. But when they do really hear what you’re saying, they agree, and look at you like they are so surprised you’d have something so nuanced and informed to say.

And they exchange cards and Italian Jew says it was great to talk to Family Man and then they are talking about how making calls and going to Ohio or Pennsylvania is the best way to serve their country, and about the greatness of America that we have to get back.

And then Family Man leaves and Italian Jew turns to you and says, kindly, that if you can become a little less jaded you will see that everything goes in cycles and this is the bottom of one cycle and soon things will turn around. And he starts telling you about how he’s separating from his wife and doesn’t get to see his kids as much as he would like and it was so great to have that conversation, because he’s been looking for something to do with his free time that will really make a difference, and he’s really going to go to Pennsylvania, maybe even tomorrow.

You tell him that you used to believe in the cyclical nature of the universe and politics too, because history has shown it to be true, but these days there are so many barriers that prevent everyday people from waking up to how they have been lied to that the theory doesn’t really hold up. To believe in the pendulum swinging the other way is to believe that people have some hope of seeing the truth in front of their faces and, even more unbelievable, acting on that truth. In actuality, the American middle class has shown itself to be so mind-blowingly stupid and manipulatable, so horrifyingly brainwashed with malls and television and idiotic jobs that there is very little chance they will ever wake up to see the horror their blindnesses have wrought.

And he said “Naw, no way, listen -” in that Noo Yawk no-offense-taken way that you like so much because it allows you to speak your heart without everyone getting all offended, and he starts telling you why there’s hope, and blah blah.

In time he packs up his things and leaves, and you just stare at him on the way out. His hope astonishes you. All his optimistic talk about Florida and Ohio and Pennsylvania – you didn’t have the heart to talk to him about stolen elections and Diebold and and and.

This battered man – separating from his wife, missing his kids, truly thinking about what is best for his country while at this crossroads in his life – he has hope and optimism and excitement for the future.

You have a lovely relationship with your partner, a great business, wonderful friends, sweet cats, a beautiful house, a horrible family you blissfully ignore with the exception of a mother you adore – and you have nightmares about apocalypse, flood waters, drained bank accounts, shocking violence, sickening cruelty, global annihilation. You wake up and the nightmares go away and your days are fine. Your life is fine. But the worry is always there.

I hope he does go to Pennsylvania.

My partner and I went there four years ago, on the eve of another election. What we saw terrified us. We didn’t like Kerry, but we went with MoveOn to motivate voters for Kerry. For two freezing cold days we went door to door in a sickening subdivision of cardboard McMansions and made sure Democrats knew where their voting place was, and did they have a ride (of course they had a ride, they had cars jammed onto available bit of pavement)?

The stupidity about the basic electoral processes by which our country supposedly functions was disgusting. On the day of the election, one woman said that her six-year-old boy had had an “election” in their class. “So, do I still need to vote? I mean, their election doesn’t count – right?” We just stared at her, then I slowly said, “Ummm…no.” We walked down the driveway, holding hands, trying not to trip over the plastic toys all over the yard. We checked her off our list. We didn’t talk for a long, long time.

That night we stood and checked off voters as they went into the voting booths, wearing our red MoveOn armbands and eyeing a whole pack of Bush voters with pasty skin and nasty sweatpants as they did the same for the Republicans. (When I checked in with the BOE people as an election volunteer, the woman had me spell my name about fifty times, then said “Well, you can translate for the Spanish people.”)

As the night went on and the news became that Kerry was going to win so easily (as we all know that he did), the Bush voters got mean. I had an awesome and decidedly-not MoveOn-approved fight with an Evangelical Bushie who kept trying to prove to me that he was a good person because he could quote so much of the Bible. I told him the Bible was a book of fairy tales that might be enjoyable as a work of fantastic fiction, it didn’t have any relevance on everyday life, and away we went. He kept challenging me to quote even one Bible verse, and I started screaming about TURNING THE OTHER CHEEK and CASTING THE FIRST STONE and THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH and anyway I was a FUCKING ATHEIST JEW, and we weren’t even supposed to know the goddamn Bible, and it was probably around then that my sweetheart had to physically pull me away.

And sometime around midnight we drove home, and on the drive home the radio started reporting Bush winning, in contrast to all exit polls and all early vote counts and reality.

I have no hope, I hate what America has become, and I am fucking terrified.

 

the most pleasant route from New Paltz NY to JFK and LaGuardia airports September 24, 2008

Filed under: new paltz — lagusta @ 4:04 pm

What’s a blog for if not to pass along completely random information? Upstaters, you’ll thank me for this, seriously.

I have a side job dropping off and picking up my sweetheart from area airports, and a lot of our time is spent thinking about ways to mitigate the trauma of driving to NYC airports. He tries to get flights from our little Stewart airport, but it’s not always possible. The next best is Newark, then LaGuardia, and JFK is the worst.

Most of his flights go out of JFK.

Here’s a nice little route that MapQuest will never suggest. It’s not a shortcut – it usually takes me between 2 hours and 2 hours, 15 minutes to get to JFK, 1 hr 45 minutes-2 hours to LaGuardia (with 1.5 hours to Newark and 1/2 hr to Stewart, you really see why JFK is such hell).

Take the Thruway to exit 17 and merge onto 84 East. Go for 45 minutes or so to exit 20S (mile 67) and get onto 684 S. At exit 1, get on the Hutch (named for Anne Hutchinson, a very cool lady.) Notice the nice stone bridges.

You can start listening to WNYC, the nice NYC NPR station at about this time (AM 820 or FM 93.9). Follow the Hutch over the Whitestone Bridge. (Hey, does the Taconic become the Hutch at some point, is that perhaps an even easier route? Let me know if you have experience with it.)

From here just follow signs for either JFK or LaGuardia. Both routes will incur traffic at about this spot. It’s OK, it’s always like this.

Notice the New York Times Building (not the one in Times Square – this is the building where the paper actually gets printed!) on your right at exit 14.

At exit 13 either turn right to go to LaGuardia (who I personally blame for everyone thinking my name has a capital G too), or left to go to JFK.

If going to JFK, on your right at around this point is the World’s Fair park with that big globe, and on your left is Shea Stadium and the US Open stadium.

Keep following the signs and you’re there!

When you come out of JFK to go home, follow signs for the Van Wyck and reverse the whole thing.

If trying to get home from LaGuardia, good luck, I always get turned around and can never remember the signs that will get you back to the Whitestone.

 

Tuesdays, you are my sunshine September 24, 2008

Filed under: book reports and the like,cooking is vegan (of course),culture and its discontents,new paltz — lagusta @ 1:41 am

You know what’s weird? I can wash silverware in my dishwasher at home just fine, but 15 minutes down the road, my pro kitchen dishwasher makes silverware all rainbowy like this. I had the water tested at a fancy lab and everything and it’s just fine, but it is strange. And strangely beautiful, don’t you think?

[Warning: this post is completely useless. It includes some rambling about good vanilla beans, otherwise it's just the kind of bloggy nothingness that kept me from starting a blog for several years. But I sometimes feel the need to prove to the Internet that I'm not all vinegar and snark and despair, so happy-day posts like this seem needed for balance once in a while.]

Ah, the power of a day off – off from work, off from the intimidating To Do list. I have lots to do, but it’s a sunny early fall Tuesday, and I decided to spend a whole passel of hours just chasing the sun. While waiting to find out if Congress will sell our futures to Wall Street, it seemed prudent to enjoy the dregs of the world left to us working class heroes.

First I rode my bike into town. My old school 1960s blue Schwinn, not the fast 1990s Schwinn that, admittedly, makes the 10-minute ride a dream. I can’t resist Blue Schwinny because of her amazing cuteness, but the truth is that foot brakes, no gears, and her zaftig frame makes the ride somewhat less zippy than a bike ride should properly be. But I was wearing a cute homemade shift dress, my hair had a freshly washed sparkle, and I had recently found an old pair of sunglasses that looked to me exactly like the pair Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (I opened a drawer labeled “art supplies” and found six pairs of vintage sunglasses I’ve collected over the years–ah,  the pleasures of being a hoarder). Schwinny (and perhaps a chic handkerchief over my hair, but I can never rock that look quite right) seemed the only option.

I went to town to be interviewed by a SUNY student for a term paper on local activist and community-groups for her class on social movements. She had chosen to focus on the Green Party, and as the figurehead (in name only – it’s really more of a collective) of the group she wanted to interview me. Her class sounded fascinating, and it reminded me that having a solidly activist college one mile from my house is a resource I should tap into more often. Her professor is active in the Stop Crossroads group, and I briefly thought about auditing the class next semester. The interview was fun – it’s always interesting to step out of day-to-day activist work and think about a bigger picture. The student was smart too, and seemed to be leaning toward changing her registration to the Greens. Success!

Baking soda and vinegar – best silverware polish ever, totally. I’ve tried everything, and keep going back to the classic bs +v. Can’t beat it.

After the interview I followed the sun onto Main Street with a plan to urge stores to sell Stop Crossroads bumper stickers and to drop off brochures for my own biz at the health food store, library, etc. (This scary economy is motivating me to become a bit more of a real business owner, sigh. Usually I am far too preoccupied with fomenting/fermenting revolution to focus on bizlady things like promotion.)

At my friendly local record store, my pal Rick said he would sell a bunch, and offered me a prime spot for my brochures right next to his cash register. He also asked if I happened to have any lunch on me, and while queries like this usually annoy me (with some exceptions – dinner parties, my too-skinny sweetheart – I lack that mothery gene that delights in feeding people), the truth is that I do have a bunch of leftovers this week and said I’d bring him some snacks tomorrow. He said my sunglasses looked nothing like Audrey’s, but that I myself look a bit like Ol’ Hep, and I have to admit that pleased even my cold radical feminist bones. (But Rick, they really are almost the same sunglasses – Wayfarers – except that hers were tortoiseshells and mine are black. Mine are authentically vintage, too, don’t I get some points for that?).

Then I popped into the health food store and talked to an acquaintance* of mine – everyone in small towns has friends like these, I suppose: I’ve chatted with her at parties, and while we’re probably not going to become BFFs or anything, I deeply like seeing her around. She’s got a certain artistic sadness about her I like. Not a gothy gloom, not a faux-artiste striped-legwarmers-in-August-because-I’m-quirky! kind of a thing, but big all-seeing eyes and an old soul way of being. We chatted, and though I couldn’t put out bumper stickers because the owner had to approve them, I did leave some of my own brochures, with some parting anxiety.

My brochures are so incredibly expensive, printed all fancily on thick 100% p.c. recycled paper with a little flax blended in, that leaving them places (which is why they exist, after all) is always slightly painful. A part of me wants to stand next to them and tell people to take one “only if you will really read it, please!“

My friend Than will not eat with real silver. Having inherited a lot of it and bought a lot more super cheap at thrift stores, I never use anything else, and am glad it doesn’t freak me out like it does him. Eating with silver brings such pleasure to a meal…even if I do have to hand wash everything.

Next I stopped in the library, and as I was dropping off yet more brochures in the entrance way, a friendly and not-too-crazy-seeming woman (it pays to be cautious – New Paltz is full of friendly crazies) started randomly talking to me about movies that the library shows for free, and had I seen 9/11 Mysteries recently at Water Street Market? I think she started talking to me because of the Stop Crossroads bumper stickers in my hands, so maybe she felt I should also know about 9/11 conspiracy theories.

When I told her that I hadn’t gone to the screening but was part of the group that put it on (the Green Party), she pulled out a copied DVD of it, saying I really should watch it. Then she gave me a card with her phone number on it and a list of other local events, two of which the GP was also co-sponsoring, and I gave her my (business) card and she bought a SC bumper sticker, and the whole thing was weirdly nice. She’s probably one of the many NP crazies, but it was sunny out and she bought a sticker and seemed to have a good heart.

I won’t watch 9/11 Mysteries though. My research into the topic does point to some small and perhaps some very large inaccuracies in the official 9/11 story, but I’ve decided that it’s just not an issue I can take on right now. You know.

Continuing on, I saw a friend and fellow business owner back at the café. We talked optimistically about how this weird and wretched economic stuff wasn’t going to affect our businesses because it was really only affecting giant corporations (secretly, I think Regan was half right–trickle-down economics works only in reverse–and I fear I am already feeling its effects, but maybe it’s just a coincidence). Then I mentioned wanting to buy some of her lovely orange aprons to match my lovely orange and yellow kitchen, and she said to come by anytime and she’d give me a good deal on them. “I’d be proud to have you wear my aprons!” were her exact words, actually. Nice.

I pedaled home and opened the mail: a birthday party invite, and–be still my heart–a packet of fifty vanilla beans from my vanilla bean guy on Maui. My vanilla bean dude has a teeny tiny vanilla operation that is beyond-organic–he hand-pollinates each vanilla orchid and each pod takes about a year to become a ripe vanilla bean. He also happens to sell his vanilla at such obscenely cheap prices that I literally blush when I send him the check (he mails you the beans then you send him a check, I am not making this up!) I talk about him here and give his phone number – if you order beans from him be sure to mention me! His beans are so cheap and awesome that I’ve stopped buying commercial vanilla extract and now make my own from ground up vanilla beans and good vodka.

With vanilla fumes swirling around the pink room, I ate summer rolls with peanut sauce, lounged around in the sun spots, and read no less than three magazines. On Tuesdays my cats are always grumpy after my compressed work week where I’m home only to sleep and brush teeth, so I try to make Tuesday Pet Day around here. Noodle sat right on Sarah Silverman on the cover of Bust and wouldn’t leave until she got good ear scratchies, Sula paced back and forth happily while I was leafing through Gourmet, and now Cleo is sitting on my lap as I savor the informative breakfast issue of the ever-fascinating Saveur.

Speaking of Bust – since I got some smack about it out of my system, I’ve been enjoying it a bit more (I also think subsequent issues haven’t been as irritating as that one). They are trying, those Busties. They are caught up in the capitalist system with its attendant celebrities and trinkets, and to a certain extent the business of revolution has been replaced by the business of lightly feminist cuteness, but no magazine can be all things to all feminists, you know? The rhymes drive me absolutely batshit crazy, but mostly it’s a little cupcake of a magazine, and everyone likes and needs a cupcake now and then. (I won’t extend the metaphor and tie it to a labored analysis of the vegan movement right now, but I could. Just know that.) It’s funny to me that the letters section is usually devoted to baby feminists gushing over how great Bust is compared with a standard women’s magazine. Bust is my guilty pleasure, and wondering what is in mainstream ladymags that makes Bust seem so revolutionary gives me absolute icy cold chills. Yikes.

In the spirit of sticking to the lazy day off theme, I am off to take a bath!

__________________

*WOW. The WordPress spellchecker is so bad that I usually Google words I think I’m misspelling, and while Googling “acquaitenance” (I know when I’m misspelling, I just don’t always know how to fix it, isn’t it weird how that happens?) my own blog post came up first. Is that just because Google knew I am me? Please Google “acquaitenance” and let me know what happens! Actually, now that I look at it, that is probably such a horrible misspelling that I’m one of only a handful of people who consistently do it – how could I think it was spelled that way? Yet more shamefully, I have a minor in French! Mon dieu!

 

sadly, Kathleen Hanna and I must part ways here: I don’t wanna go to the carnival September 20, 2008

Filed under: culture and its discontents,new paltz,stop consuming so fucking much — lagusta @ 4:01 pm

I do love that song, though. “I’ll win that Mötley Crüe mirror / If it fucking kills me!”

Here’s how I was going to start this post:

Might I posit something? The surfeit of festivals, celebrations, fiestas, festas, fairs, and other community-minded events that my little town is awash in every summer and fall exist merely to provide value to boring people’s lives. Thus, being as I am a person whose life is full of meaning, purpose, vigor, and drive, these festive events always irk me.

I don’t think this is completely true. I think some of these festivals are useful and there is something wrong with me that I don’t enjoy them very much. But the above is at least a little bit true also, so I’m going to leave it.

In fairness, many of the people who go to and help put on these events are creative, purposeful people with extremely meaningful lives. They just feel the need to mix with their neighbors and friends in a structured, festive way. I don’t feel this need. I throw a party every few months and go to friend’s parties, and once or twice a year I will go to a food-related festival and thoroughly enjoy myself. But when pretty much every summertime and fall weekend brings yet another “celebration” of this or that, I start to get annoyed.

This sounds so incredibly Scroogy, but it is my personal, private (well, no longer private) opinion that there are entirely too many of these damn things and what people should be doing with their time is working. Not working for money, exactly, but working on something meaningful – a garden, a book, an art project not created expressly to be exhibited at a future arts festival, an improved sex life, an outfit, something.

Perhaps I should clarify my position:

I am not talking about:

Yard sales, garage sales, church basement sales, flea markets, library book sales, etc.

Harvest potlucks, farm potlucks, locavore potlucks, etc.

Festivals/celebrations that have a clear purpose (particularly food-related ones like the garlic festival, pickle festival etc.)

Farmer’s markets (obviously).

What I’m talking about are things like:

Celebrations of vague things like “The Arts” (as opposed to a fiddle festival or something specific)

Parades

“Name-of-your-town Day” (i.e. Gardiner Day)

Fairs (admittedly these things do have at least somewhat of a purpose – prize tomatoes and all that shit – and it is just a personal defect that they depress me)

Street festivals, oh the goddamn street festivals. The NYC ones are the worst (pretty much just a showcase for cheap crap, ads, and fried food*) but even the upstate ones, which ostensibly showcase regional music, food, and tchotchkes, are pretty much useless, except for leafletting purposes.

“Taste of XXX Town” (the entire “Taste” industry is only useful for restaurants serving mid-priced crap food, and/or big cities. I can understand “Taste of Chicago,” for example, as a way to find out about new restaurants. “Taste of New Paltz,” where everyone knows all the restaurants already, makes no sense to me. But whatever, have at it, what do I care. Maybe it makes money for some restaurants, and god knows it’s hard enough already owning a restaurant.)

Fun fact: In the US we call spun sugar “cotton candy,” in the UK it’s “candy floss,” and in Australia (well, in Tasmania, where this picture was taken) it’s called, apparently, “fairy floss.”  Fascinating, no?

Perhaps if I was a musician or struggling artist or parent I would feel differently. In a way I am a struggling artist, but not the kind whose career will be helped by a street festival. People always tell me I should sell food at these festivals, but I just can’t. I don’t like talking to people about my food, and not to be snotty or anything, but I know it wouldn’t get me clients. Also, my food is most decidedly not festival food – street festival people don’t want to pay $2.00 for a handmade, organic, fair-trade truffle. They want a giant hot dog they can stuff into their gaping maw whilst sitting on a hay bale.

And kids seem to really enjoy these festivals, it seems, and so good for them. And musicians need some place to get their start besides bars.

But if you don’t have kids or enjoy mediocre local bands, mediocre local art or mediocre local food, I’m a little baffled as to the appeal of all these celebrations, especially in a town 90 miles from NYC, where there are such exceptional cultural happenings.

Does that sound snotty and elitist? I fully intend it to. It’s not that there is nothing good happening culturally upstate – there are a lot of great things happening, relatively speaking. But if we are brutally honest, we have to admit that there is not enough great culture being made to justify all these “celebrations.” And – admit it, you know it’s true – the people who are really making the great art are most decidedly not exhibiting it at an outdoor street festival.

It seems to me that attending these events is yet another thing to do to fill up time before death for many people – a chance for people without much imagination to participate in readymade events that will lead to readymade memories. They seem to be shortcuts to a full life, like making a “scrapbook” on the computer from a free downloadable template.

And honestly, I think that there is already enough (TV, mainstream media, etc.) to distract us from the fact that the world is going to hell and we are all living these sad, diminished lives because of endgame capitalism. What we really need to do is first get our shit straight and reclaim a livable world. After that maybe we can have a parade.

But who am I to judge? I just spent half an hour writing about this crap instead of making true art of my own. If I really wanted to walk the walk I would be out selling Stop Crossroads bumperstickers (suggested donation, minimum $1, email me if you’d like one).

.

Oh my god a teeny 8-week-old chihuahua just passed by in the palm of some crazy chihuahua lady. I’m no fan of purebred dogs, but holy fuck that dog was cute.

Here is how all my blog posts come about:

1) While sitting at the café, I get annoyed at something.

2) I stop doing paperwork to write about said thing.

3) A cute dog passes by. I feel better.

4) I feel stupid about posting so much negativity in a world with such damn cute dogs.

5) Dog goes away.

6) I hit “publish.”

________________

*Full disclosure: DID YOU KNOW THAT FRIED DOUGH IS ALMOST ALWAYS VEGAN? A lump of fried dough with a pound or two of powdered sugar is such an unending treat that it almost makes street festivals worthwhile. When I was a kid living in the Southwest the State Fair had the greatest thing: fried dough with refried beans, lettuce, tomatoes, and hot sauce (and cheese, for some people – never guacamole or avocado slices though) – amazing. When followed up with a dessert of fried dough with powdered sugar, it was a perfect childhood summertime State Fair meal. And my State Fair was a proper fair – acres and acres of games, rides, exhibits, crap to buy you never saw anywhere else, and one of those ski lift rides that went over the whole thing. I saw my first show at the State Fair when I was two: Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. No mediocre local bands or County Fairs for me, thank you very much. If you’re going to do it, why not take the time and really do it?

 

his and hers radio September 17, 2008

Filed under: cooking is vegan (of course),culture and its discontents,i heart feminists,music doesn't always suck, just usually,politics,stop consuming so fucking much — lagusta @ 10:21 pm

“Yo yo yo! I am a tomato! Heirloom, peeps!” (Adhering strictly to the old slogan “I don’t eat anything with a face,” my sous chef Veronica and I couldn’t bring ourselves to chop up this little man.)

Hers: The aforementioned F-Files’ interview with yours truly. My voice is breathtakingly weird (literally: I get excited and forget to breathe whenever I do these kinds of things), but overall it went well – the hosts, Jackie Arsenuk and Deric Shannon, were so wonderful that it made the interview fun. Click on “shows.”

His: My sound engineer sweetheart’s truly luscious recording of Conor Oberst’s Corrina Corrina is so sweet (and so well mixed), I had to share it with you. As a bonus, the performance is great too!

Enjoy!

 

Monday miscellany: militant vegan Wednesday edition September 17, 2008

Filed under: book reports and the like,culture and its discontents,fermentation fervor forever!,i heart atheists,i heart feminists,Monday Miscellany,politics — lagusta @ 7:58 pm

Shameless friend-of-a-friend plug alert: Here’s a cute little essay from the New York Times, written by my rad pal Mary’s BFF, Joanna. Neato!

I just realized that in the past six months I sent over 3,000 emails. Is it normal for people who do not work in an office to send an average of 17 emails a day, every day, or do I have some sort of disease? A productivity disease, perhaps?

I really enjoyed this Vegan de Guadalupe zine (hooray for zines in 2008!) and bet you would too. It’s sold out, but maybe if you beg she will do a second printing?

Speaking of reading, I stayed up until 5 AM last night reading A Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman. It wasn’t as technically well done as, say, Fun Home or Persepolis, but there is absolutely something to be said for the graphic biography format. I always assumed that any additional information I had on Red Emma would only increase my love for her, but I closed the book with a vast sadness and uneasiness. She accomplished a lot and has of course inspired generations, but her sympathy for violent methods of revolutionary action really bothered me, as did the last 15 or so years of her life, which seemed to be all about how the world she worked for was never to be. (Being a nonviolent anarchist, I tend to forget that the vast majority of the world only knows about the violent anarchist faction.) But it was a good read. And you get some juicy “if I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution” details on her complicated and wild not-so-private life.

Speaking of revolutionaries, the always right-on John Robbins (who I’ve been in love with since I was 14, yo, for serious) has a great article on Weston A. Price Foundation and the Nourishing Traditions crazies. The best part is the end:


“I regret to say that those running the Weston A. Price Foundation today seem to have their own agenda. They are proponents of the philosophy that in order to be healthy, people must eat large amounts of saturated fat from animal products. They insist that only with the regular consumption of lard, butter and other full-fat dairy products, and beef, can people derive the nutrients they need to be healthy.

Toward that end, the Foundation has widely publicized an article written by a former member of the Foundation’s Board of Directors, Stephen Byrnes, titled “The Myths of Vegetarianism.”

The article is harshly critical of vegetarian diets, and concludes with an “About the Author” section which states: “Stephen Byrnes… enjoys robust health on a diet that includes butter, cream, eggs, meat, whole milk, dairy products and offal.” In fact, Stephen Byrnes suffered a fatal stroke in June, 2004. According to reports of his death, he had yet to reach his 40th birthday.”

Yikes.

Full disclosure: I like that the Weston A. Price Foundation people have good things to say about fermented foods and coconut butter. I’m not at all above admitting that crazies can be right about some things.

Local folks: The New Paltz Green Party has some good events coming up, won’t you please go to some of them? Like that talk on septic systems? I’m going to go not only because I am the head of the group and don’t always go to the events and this is a very bad trait, but also because I have a septic system and should know more about it. Maybe you do too? Please go!

 

 
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