Now Playing: Last Nite, by The Strokes

Sleep has been something of a challenge for me over the last few months. I often find it difficult to fall asleep, and I wake up at least once most nights. Last night was one of those lovely rare occasions where I fell asleep quickly and wasn’t having nightmares or back pain. Then some horrible person phoned me at a quarter to two wanting to know had I just phoned her. I hadn’t; thoroughly annoyed, it took me the better part of an hour to get back to sleep.

Less sleep means rough mornings for me, and today all I wanted to do while taking care of the morning’s chores was to listen to something loud and cheerful. I played through several music videos before finding one that made me feel a bit better: the Strokes. My favourite song of theirs is actually ‘Soma’, which got me through the first few months of being desperately ill with UC and anemia, but those same associations make it rather hard for me to listen to now. This song has altogether better memories associated with it–dancing in my friends’ underground kitchen in Queen’s Gardens and doing the polka home with fellow graduate students from the pub to our hall of residence a couple hundred feet away. Back when staying up half the night wasn’t painful and I wasn’t allergic to caffeine. I do miss those nights.

Friday Fave: Marley Dias

Stretching out on a pile of books this large was one of my childhood fantasies. Unfortunately I didn’t own this many until I was in my late teens, by which time it was less appealing as a physical activity.

Marley Dias is one of my heroes. Her story started spreading over the Internet at the beginning of this year, when she founded the #1000blackgirlbooks movement. I loved books every bit this much when I was eleven; I had approximately 0% of her social awareness, discipline, or self-confidence. Over twenty-five years later, I have some of her social awareness and a tiny bit of her discipline, maybe a little more self-confidence than I started with, but I’m still lagging waaay behind. I still 100% hate being in front of a camera. Forget just being a role model for kids; a lot of grown-ups could learn a thing or two from her.

In addition to her ongoing book campaign,–she has hit her target, but why quit when you’re ahead?–and BAM, a related project/website she runs with her friends Briana and Amina, the magazine Elle recently invited her to edit a special edition ‘zine called Marley Mag. (I’m not entirely sure how a ‘zine is different from a magazine; is this a new thing, or just shorthand for the same thing we pick up next to the grocery-store check-out?) She is self-possessed when meeting the likes of Oprah and Ellen, and not a little photogenic; that she finds time to do all this and still attend school on a regular basis–and still read books–amazes me. I get a little tired just thinking about how much energy that must take.
I’d put money on her becoming the Lin-Manuel Miranda or Misty Copeland of the publishing world by the time she’s 30 20, at the rate she’s going.

I might have mentioned a time or twenty that I’m an avid reader; I also work in the publishing industry, and am a writer myself. I hear and read a great deal about how literacy is dying, people aren’t learning handwriting any more, everyone’s reading e-books and computers instead of printed books, and thus not absorbing as much of what they read. Insofar as that is true–and I agree that it is, at least in part, although all the dire warnings from the 1980s that by the year 2000 only a fraction of the population might be able to read proved wildly overstated, and I suspect that the predictions of the extinction of the printed page will prove similarly exaggerated–it is on us to keep that from happening. There are severe problems with the educational system, to be sure, and they do need fixing, but no one is going to enjoy reading if they only do it in the schoolroom and then in the workplace. Bemoaning the loss of literacy and writing skills makes no sense when as a nation we take such brief notice of people like Marley and other kids with similar, if less revolutionary, aims, such as Blake AnsariTyler Fugett, Evan Feldberg-Bannatyne, and Kirstin Shipp. I love that someone this young, with a bit of star quality and a ton of ambition, has made the celebration of reading and a demand for greater diversity in literature her mission in life. This is how we can save our literary culture. More power to her, and all those who have decided to emulate her.

Now Playing: We Are Young, by Fun.

There are several images and phrases this election regularly brings to my mind, on a weekly if not a daily basis. One of my preferred images is the bar fight in the video for Fun.’s We Are Young; at least they look like they’re having a good time in between slinging stuffed animals at each other and breaking things. Also, I’m fascinated by Nate Ruess because he looks precisely like I always imagined Tom Sawyer would look like as a real person (well, the adult version thereof). I find myself pulling up this video often these days when politics-related fretting starts to get too much. The song also features Janelle Monae, one of my personal heroes, who is always worth watching–more on her later.

Friday Fave: Cheese Chasers

Cheese has always been a serious matter in my household. My father is in general one of those people unwilling to spend more than absolutely necessary on what he needs; if I’m buying a packet of cocoa powder, or a cut of meat, or a new phone, he has always found it necessary to query why I’m buying this or that particular brand or style, and inform me (usually more than once) that I would have spent less if I’d bought said thing somewhere else, or a different brand’s version. There are, however, a few things he does not compromise on: marmalade, bread, and cheese. Never once has he argued with me over the price of a loaf of bread, and anything labeled as “cheese food” or “spray cheese” is not allowed in the house. We bought Velveeta once to make nachos, but it was pronounced a failure. I do remember a brief period from my childhood when we had Kraft slices at home, possibly because I had begged for them–I have absolutely no memories of taking them to school for lunch, but I think we used them for cheese toast–but when Cabot cheese appeared in our local supermarket, that was the end of individually wrapped, plasticky cheese. I also remember my mother describing how someone had told her that she cooked macaroni and cheese for dinner at least once a week, because it was so tasty and saved her money, and wondering how it could possibly save her money when a block of cheese for the dish cost so much; I’m not sure my mother had ever realized, at least at that point, that a box of macaroni and cheese mix included powdered stuff that resembled cheese sauce when prepared.

As long as there has been high-quality cheese available in our local supermarkets, preferably imported from the UK or France or Italy, there has always been a block of cheddar in our refrigerator. It is often accompanied by a piece of brie or camembert, and more recently, Danish blue. I’d make a great many more trips to the Whole Foods cheese counter if my income allowed. (When I lived in Edinburgh there was J. Mellis Cheesmongers, one of the nicest cheese shops ever. Mellis has six locations in Scotland; I’ve lived within a five-minute walk of three of them, at various times. Of the many, many things I miss about Scotland, this is one of them. If Atlanta has anything comparable, I haven’t found it yet.) Costco has been, if not a life-saver, at least a great boon in this regard.

Image result for cheese slices tv show

One of the perks of frequently housesitting for friends is getting to watch the cable stations that my own provider doesn’t carry. A few years ago I was channel surfing and came across a show called Cheese Slices, or Cheese Chasers. (It seems to have different names depending on where it’s aired.) It’s a half hour program devoted entirely to cheese, and honestly, given how much people love cheese (it’s as addictive as a drug, apparently, did you know?) I don’t know why no one thought of this years ago. Each episode is devoted to a different region of the world known for producing a specific variety of cheese, and the host, Will Studd, goes to different commercial and home-grown businesses that produce the cheese. They discuss each variety’s history, the milk it’s made from–often accompanied by shots of the herds kept to produce said milk–the legal restrictions it’s subject to, and usually a meal or two that features the cheese. I find it fascinating, and endlessly irritating that it’s only available in broken-up segments on YouTube–I’d happily buy the series on dvd if it was available; episodes are available for purchase on his website, but I don’t know what the cost is per show. I suspect it’s more than I’m willing to pay, at least for now. There are clips available on YouTube, if you hunt for them–look for Will Studd, because if you just do a search for “Cheese Chasers” you get a lot of clips of a classic cartoon episode by the same name. If you happen to have a cable service provided that carries the otherwise ridiculous Wealth TV (now labeling itself A Wealth of Entertainment), keep an eye out for it.

Studd himself is an evangelist for unpasteurized milk and dairy products, which I don’t entirely agree with. I do think it’s silly to prohibit the sale of unpasteurized cheeses, because they do have a flavor that can’t be achieved with pasteurized milk, and can be delicious; I don’t know of anywhere that prohibits the making and consumption of sushi, as long as any such sale is accompanied by the obligatory warning about the possibility of becoming sick from eating uncooked fish. On the other hand, the law on the sale of unpasteurized milk exists for a good reason, as grotesquely and effectively illustrated in an early episode of Boardwalk Empire. People can easily see the difference between uncooked and cooked fish, chicken, and meat; pasteurized and unpasteurized milk, and the cheese made therefrom, isn’t similarly distinguishable at a glance.

But back to the cheese. Each episode finishes off with a meal–many of them are simple picnics, pairing the cheeses with local meats and wines, and some require specific pans that I don’t have access to, or techniques I haven’t mastered (I *will* make a proper frittata one day. I will), but there was one recipe that I am going to try just as soon as I find the right sort of cheese. I wish I could link to the original clip, or give credit to the family who seems to have thought of this (unless it’s a traditional local dish that I just haven’t been able to guess the name of, I did try searching by ingredients), and the next time I get a chance to see the episode I will (it’s in episode 6 of season 1, I think), but until then, try this, it looks delicious.

You will need a bowl at least 3 inches or so deep and a saucepan large enough to fit the bowl easily inside. A steamer insert would also be handy, but isn’t necessary. Fill the saucepan an inch deep with water and bring the boil. While the water is heating, crumble or shred a few slices of Lancashire cheese and sprinkle them in a ring around the edge of the bowl. Crack an egg into the center of the cheese ring. (Amounts of cheese and egg can be increased according to how many people are sharing the dish.) Cut a fresh Roma or other small tomato or two into thin slices and arrange them over the cheese in a ring. Set the bowl carefully into the pan of boiling water–use an oven glove or a dishtowel to avoid burning yourself. (This is where the steamer basket is a handy thing, if you have one.) Cover the saucepan with its lid and allow to steam for five minutes–more time may be necessary if you’ve got more than one egg. Remove the bowl carefully from the pan, again being careful not to burn yourself. Serve with a loaf of crusty bread, toasted or fresh. Spoon the melted cheese and poached egg onto the bread as you eat. Comfort food at its finest, and great for a cool autumn or winter morning.

Rotisserie Chicken: The Best and Worst of America

Things are awful, people are awful, the world is a terrible place and I want to cry: these are my general reactions to my daily doses of the news. The United States, like a complicated new baking recipe, is a fabulous idea but in the early stages of its development, a hot mess. Which brings me to rotisserie chicken.

Look. I know the food systems in our country are a tangled web of special interests, subsidies gone wrong, the degradation of most of our arable land, and animal cruelty on an unspeakable scale. I don’t eat a ton of meat and I try to find sustainably (or at least humanely) raised meat when I do buy it.

Yet there are days–long hours of hard work at the barn, or hours spent trying to write with nothing to show–when I realize I should probably feed myself, and that my husband would appreciate me including him in the effort so I shouldn’t just eat popcorn, and it’s really irresponsible and expensive to order out, and I’m exhausted, and I want something that tastes like Real Food but I absolutely do not want to cook it, that I remember rotisserie chickens exist.

What a soothing product. What a shining beacon of American-ness. Sometimes they just make everything right with the world: they are available everywhere, they are consistently good and sometimes delicious, and they are appallingly cheap (often 30, and as much as 50, percent less than the cost of a similarly sized raw chicken where both are sold).

America! How did we invent this miraculous product? Of course, the food item itself is probably one of the oldest known to humanity, but why and how has this become a ubiquitous quick dinner solution across our nation?

(I should note that the quintessentially American rotisserie chicken does, as do most of the best food traditions in the western world, owe a debt to France. Apparently, the notoriously food-fickle Napoleon was kind of an addict. For instance: “When he rode out of Cairo on Christmas Eve to survey the Suez isthmus, the only provisions he took were three roasted chickens wrapped in paper.”)

But I digress. ‘Murica! The Washington Post wrote a piece a couple years back claiming that our national trend began with with the expansion of the Boston Market food chain in the 1980s. A grocery store economics site says the store chickens are so cheap because many markets are just getting rid of food that wouldn’t otherwise sell (i.e., reaching sell-by dates). Some stores do have dedicated rotisserie chicken programs in order to churn out as many as possible. I assume stores discovered that folks would come in for that one low- or no-margin product and leave with many other more profitable ones. I know that’s what happens to me whenever I cave and stop in at Costco or Whole Foods on the way home.

Photograph by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Photograph by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

The 1980s timeline makes sense to me. The ’80s were when women–overwhelmingly the ones doing the food shopping and cooking–entered the work force full time in droves. There was suddenly demand for fast food that tasted like you might imagine home-cooked food would taste if you’d never had it. Plus, that’s when a lot of chains were making the jump from regional to national.

So this is a foodstuff that grew in popularity as America became steadily more connected coast to coast and as our food systems deepened into the painfully contorted knots first tied by ag policies dating to the Great Depression. Rotisserie chickens simultaneously reflect one of the great goods of America (affordable abundance) and one of the great evils (refusal to address the true environmental and health costs of underpriced goods).

After the initial still-hot dinner meal, I have my leftover guilty pleasure chicken on top of salads or grains, mixed into pasta, or nibbled cold out of the container because I’m a monster. I knew a woman who bought a Market Basket rotisserie chicken every single week, got two meals out of it, then made stock. What do you do with yours?

If this post has left you craving some, don’t worry, you can watch a full length movie of one roasting thanks to Netflix. Or, you know, visit the Costco Rotisserie Chicken official Facebook page. Like you do.

A Note on Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights

 

I discovered Cassandra Clare’s The Infernal Devices trilogy last year and fell head over heels for the steampunk London she created and the characters inhabiting it, so much so that I barely cared about the anachronisms and inconsistencies in details of the story that are supposed to be realistic–something that usually strikes me like nails on the proverbial chalkboard.

One detail of the story really did bother me, though, and it isn’t something Clare alone is guilty of. When the heroine, Tessa, is falling for the boy of her decidedly literary dreams, she envisions him more than once as Heathcliff, from Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

When and how did Heathcliff get turned into a figure of romance and desire?

Wuthering Heights is a phenomenal novel, one of my personal favourites and one of the greats of English literature. If you haven’t read it, do, it’s amazing. The thing is, it’s not a romantic, bittersweet love story. It’s a story about a boy who is tormented by his adopted family who grows up into a violent, bitter sociopath. Heathcliff is not a nice man, and he is not written that way. I am endlessly confused as to where this idea that he belongs among the ranks of Mr. Darcy and Pip from Great Expectations came from; why it persists is less of a mystery, but it’s still frustrating.

It must have happened before the 1970s, for Heath Ledger’s parents to name him and his sister after Heathcliff and Cathy. Was the soppy 1939 film version responsible? Are people reading the Cliffs Notes version and skipping the actual book? I would love to start a conversation about this, because it isn’t the sort of thing one can find an answer to in any volume of criticism on Emily Bronte, and unless I know where to read for the answers I want I’ll be trailing around in the dark for who knows how long. If you have any insights, please please please feel free to leave a comment.

(P.S. if you’re looking for a more faithful adaptation of the story, the 1992 version with Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche and the 2011 version by Andrea Arnold are both excellent, although Arnold’s only covers part of the story. I love Tom Hardy and all, but the 2009 version was a disappointment–particularly because he would have made a brilliant Heathcliff if the script had been better. )

Friday Fave: Christine and the Queens

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Pop music that isn’t sung in English rarely gets much of a listen among U.S. audiences. once in a while a song, usually associated with an insanely popular film, that includes a verse–or a phrase or two–in a second language will be really popular, but for the most part it’s English all the way. I wonder at times if French pop is met with particularly studied rejection after the brief rage for Jordy’s “Dur Dur D’Etre Bebe” back in 1992 (apologies to all who had successfully blocked that memory. I think I remember buying the single when it came out, but mostly I remember a few instances of singing the lyrics along with a few classmates to torture our French teacher, who was remarkably patient and good-natured but hated the song. It does grate on the nerves after about 10 seconds.)

Dur Dur D’Etre Bebe (and the somewhat alarming image of family life portrayed in its video) aside, the general distaste for foreign pop and rock music is a pity on many scores. I’ve always found it particularly odd when a singer or a group makes the charts in several other countries, or all over the world, and remains virtually unknown in the U.S. As with so many things–particularly football/soccer–this feels like a sort of willful denial on our part, and a bit immature. As though we are covering our ears, scrunching up our faces and muttering “unh-uh” while a the rest of the world holds out a glass of good champagne and a plate of chocolate truffles to us, insisting that we’ll like it if we only give it a chance.

I stopped paying attention to music television and radio when I was finishing high school, save for a brief spell in 2001 when my otherwise tight-fisted landlord gave us free cable television for six months (so he could hike the rent on the next tenants) and there were a couple of music stations that still played music videos. Since then, I’ve relied on reviews, word of mouth, and television shows to hear new stuff. The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert have proved particularly useful in this regard–they don’t have musical guests on all that often, but those they do have are usually acts I find worth listening to. Or, in case of The National, find myself a week later trying to buy up their complete back catalogue.

The only other act from TDS I’ve really fallen for is Christine and the Queens, otherwise known as Héloïse Letissier offstage. She was one of Trevor Noah’s first few musical guests, if not the first, and I think I enjoyed Noah’s complete loss for words at how to respond to her performance as I did the music itself. She and her dancers/band are one of the few rock/pop acts that make live music an actual performance, not by adding a lightshow and other special effects, but by making dance and a number of cultural references an integral part of the show along with the singing. She also uses every song she sings to question and break down gender and sexual normativity, which a lot of people still find threatening; as I watched Trevor Noah’s brief interview with her, I wondered if he had bothered to listen to any of her music before the show.

I didn’t rush to iTunes for the album immediately, but when I did get to it a few weeks later I wished I had. I played it pretty much non-stop for a month, and it was one of the things that got me through last December without losing my mind. She has a lovely voice, and does 80s-style synth-pop better than they did in the 80s. (Granted, she probably has better equipment than was available 25-30 years ago.) She does sing in French, but she re-recorded the album for international release with some of the lyrics translated into English. It sounds like an odd proposition, and I’m sure in some cases it would produced questionable results, but she makes it work beautifully.

She seems to be making waves everywhere but here, which is a pity; we’re missing out. Of course the language barrier isn’t the only obstacle to her popularity over here–we may be making strides in terms of breaking down prejudice against the cishet status quo, but there’s a ways to go yet. Letissier just isn’t interested in waiting, or diluting her style to make it more palatable for the general population: she does what makes her happy. I’m sure it would make a great many more people here happy too, if they had a listen.

Further reading and listening:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/07/christine-and-the-queens-soho-drag-club-to-french-superstardom-heloise-letissier

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/christine-and-the-queens_us_5765a79ce4b0853f8bf11ee8

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Christine+and+the+QUeens&&view=detail&mid=E8E9A1DF1C08D4CE4F7AE8E9A1DF1C08D4CE4F7A&FORM=VRDGAR

 

Friday Fave: Halt and Catch Fire

When Halt and Catch Fire started three years ago, my sole reason for watching it was Lee Pace, who is all kinds of awesome and I couldn’t understand why his shows kept getting cancelled. (If you haven’t seen Wonderfalls or Pushing Daisies, go hunt them up on Netflix or YouTube or wherever, stat. You have been missing out for years. Also, boo, Fox and ABC respectively, boo.) I was mildly interested that it was filmed in Atlanta, but mostly it was to watch Lee Pace. Beyond that, I didn’t know what to expect–I think I had an idea that it would be a bit like Mad Men, but set in Silicon Valley. Not knocking Mad Men, which was great, but I was getting a bit bored with the white-male-mid-life crisis angst and tragedy. It has been the primary focus of quite a bit of truly brilliant television in recent years–Breaking Bad being another example–and said television has featured some women and even (rarely) central characters who aren’t white, but brilliant television always inspired dozens of not-as-great imitations, usually with less imagination and even less effort at representation.

Mad Men this is not. Corporate culture certainly has a presence in the story, but this time it holds no allure or glamour; it is a world that is stifling, threatening, something that three of the four, if not all, of the main characters are fighting to overthrow, not to conquer. They are not a part of of it and they have no wish to be. Neither is this a male-dominated show, which has been glossed over or gotten lost in some of the advertising. It is about two men, two women, and the rise of the home computer industry. The acting is excellent.

Underneath that, of course, it is about so much more. It is about two couples: one pair who constantly have to negotiate their way between a desire for the stereotypical suburban home and 2.5 children and making the most of their considerable talent for engineering and mathematics, and the other whose relationship is pretty much just a hot mess. It is about two women who decide that they don’t want to be relegated to support roles in the lives of the men they work for and live with, and how they struggle with suddenly being seen as a threat by those same men, consciously and otherwise. It is a close comparison of the intersections between work and home life change when you have a family and all that that entails.

It isn’t a perfect television series–some episodes are better than others, and some of the subplots are at times more compelling than the central story. It could do better in terms of representation, although it’s doing better than some shows in this regard. I’m also finding that the effort to cover all the major leaps in the evolution of the computing world are feeling a bit strained. I know just enough about coding and hacking to have found that aspect of The Honourable Woman a constant irritation in watching the last few episodes of show, but not enough to be distracted by any errors present in this one. What does bother me is that, in the world of the story, these four people seem to responsible for most, if not all of the major innovations that we now take for granted–the initial Apple vs. Microsoft fight was substantial enough, but some six years later they’ve also created the seeds of e-bay, online multi-player games, and it looks like someone might be about to invent a thinly-disguised Sirius radio. With the sheer number of people who were and are drawn to this industry–something that is reflected in the show, whenever a scene takes place in public or business setting–it feels disingenuous to present this quartet of characters as the only really imaginative innovators in the field, and placing so much of the burden of that innovation on those four characters takes away from the parts of the story that make the show compelling.

The thing I love best about the show is that it has two fully developed female leads who work and live in what is still a male-dominated industry, but beyond that I love that the writers decided to maintain their focus on these four characters, and the development of the story constantly realigns their alliances and allegiances enough to keep their interactions interesting but not so much that all four come off as sociopaths who have no real grasp of what fidelity is. (Joe is a sociopath, but he’s written that way; the other three are sane, if damaged to varying degrees.) I also really like that the show’s title is an integral metaphor for the shared tendency of the characters to self-sabotage their emotional and professional relationships; titles are important when it comes to stories, but televisions shows are usually just named for their character or a setting. It’s unusual to have such an apt title continue to reflect an important aspect of the story, and I think a lot of the reviewers who dismissed the show in its first two seasons didn’t make that connection–I’ve only ever seen it mentioned in order to explain the term’s meaning as a coding command.

I don’t tend to read a lot of reviews for any one show, and the few I’ve read over the past three years for this one have always made me feel like the decision to renew it must be balanced on a knife-edge; it has always been highly rated by calculators such as Rotten Tomatoes, but it seemed to suffer from a lack of interest rather than negative opinion. Renewals for the second and third season were thus pleasant surprises. (Most of those reviews I have read have complained about the show’s lack of substance, to the point that I wonder if they actually watched the thing. It has substance in plenty; it is just that you can only take the drama of literally creating code and machinery so far. After that the human elements of egotism and jealousy and fecklessness and just plain wanting something from another person have to take over, otherwise you have no story.)

Season three seems to be attracting more attention, and more positive reviews, than the first two, so I’m finally allowing myself to hope for season four. Season three is currently airing Tuesday nights on AMC in the U.S.; in the UK it is available on Amazon Prime.