Niçoise salad just the good parts

December 23rd, 2008

I really wanted to make myself dinner tonight but there were two problems. Problem one was, I could not in good conscience buy *anything* because I’m about to be gone for more than a week. Problem two was that there was nothing in the fridge because I just got home. My itinerary goes/went: Mexico, Maryland, Morocco, and then at some point early in the new year, back to Moscow. It’s impressive, right, all this globetrotting? Except it’s not, when you put it in its proper context of: I have basically never left the country before (well, France at 13. And, hey, Canada!) So of course all this traveling is having the expected effect of broadening my horizons and making me think all sorts of clichéd deep thoughts.

Like: People are always saying “Whoa, small world!” about different predictable flow-charty confluences that happen in New York. But the actual world is not small at all. What is small: the cohort of college-educated people ages 22-45 who live and work in New York City who didn’t grow up here but hope to continue to live here as adults. That shit is tiny. And looking up at the stars on the beach in a Mexican fishing village last week, I thought about how different New York might be if we could look up and see everything else that’s out there, sparkling right in front of our faces on a regular basis.

Anyway, this is what I ended up eating based on the contents of my fridge/larder, and it might gross you out but I was really into it.

Ingredients:

handful (5 or 6) fingerling potatoes

1 can oil-packed Italian tuna

1/2 cup parsley, roughly chopped

3 eggs

capers, Niçoise or kalamata olives, anything of that nature you have in the condiments part of your fridge

Dressing:

1/2 shallot, finely chopped

decent-sized spoonful of dijon mustard

red wine vinegar

olive oil

salt and pepper

Directions:

Come home from last-minute Christmas shopping hungry and strangely frantic. Consult the to-do list you made today. The fact that you did something as uncharachteristic as making a to-do list is a bad, bad sign. Sit down for a minute at the computer to make sure everything is sort of baseline okay. An hour later, starving, get up from the computer and go put a pot of water to boil on the stove.

Also make a bowl of icewater by putting ice into water in a bowl!

When the water is boiling, gently slip three eggs in and boil them for like 12-14 minutes with the aid of the timer function on your new Timex indiglo digital watch that is exactly like the first watch you ever owned, and which will help you be on time to things like an adult and is an awesome gift for anyone you know who would appreciate a Japanese-imported plastic watch. It comes in a little neon coffin at Opening Ceremony. When you’ve removed the eggs to their ice-bath, stick the potatoes in that same boiling water. Why not? Boil them for 10 minutes or until tender but not falling apart.

While this is happening make the dressing and buy your train ticket back from Maryland. Why did you leave this til the last minute? Now everything is retardedly expensive. Well, whatever, it’s not like you would otherwise have spent that money wisely — for example, that same plastic watch sans fancy Japanese packaging and cool plastic-color is $24.99 at Target, you’ll find. Anyway, the dressing: whisk the chopped shallot, the salt and pepper, the mustard and the vinegar together, then slowly drizzle in the oil until it’s emulsified.

When the potatoes are done, remove the eggs from icebath, add more ice to it, and add the potatoes. Then drain and chop both eggs and potatoes and add them back into the bowl with the parsley, the capers, the olives, the dressing, and the can of tuna! Your cat will go to any lengths to try to eat this, so don’t set it on the floor in front of the tv while you pour yourself a glass of wine from that bottle in the fridge that you’re obligated to finish because by the time you get back into town, it will definitely have gone bad.

Serves one. Watching a Paula Deen Christmas special while eating it is optional.

Nobody loves no one

December 16th, 2008

If you’re in New York you should go see Pipilotti Rist’s video installation at the MOMA.  If you’re in Mexico you should put down the computer and go to the beach!

Lurkr no more

December 10th, 2008

I have a Twitter nowWhatsthatcat was the tipping point.  Yikes, I had sworn I would never do this!  But maybe it’s okay because by now Twitter’s novelty has worn off to the point where people don’t exclusively use it to namedrop about parties they’re at and to make meta-jokes about Twitter.   Also it seems like people have stopped taking the Twitter FAQ at its word that “whether you’re ‘eating an apple’ or ‘looking foward to the weekend’ or ‘heading out of town’ it’s twitter-worthy.”   Another upside: now at least I won’t have to email everyone I know individually when I come up with a “joke” such as: “When Britney dies at least one obituary will start, ‘Her loneliness has finally killed her.’”

I told it in person a bunch too and no one laughed once.  But I’m still amused!

Sweet!

December 5th, 2008

obamacake.jpg

@ the Bakery on Vanderbilt (between Willoughby and Myrtle).   They also have delicious eclairs.

A little dash of high school bitchy

December 2nd, 2008

The problem with writing a profile of Tina Fey that’s all about how she lost 30 lbs, got designer frames, and marched out of the writer’s room to sit behind the Weekend Update desk is: that all happened eight years ago.  There have been plenty of profiles of Tina Fey since then, and they’ve all thoroughly described her metamorphosis from dowdy writer to movie star, her “boobs and butt,” and her ambivalence about being a ‘thinking man’s sex symbol.’   So really the problem I have with Maureen Dowd’s Vanity Fair profile, which hinges almost entirely on whether Fey will eat a proffered cupcake — God, forced eating is such a tired trope of celeb-lady profile, almost as tired as “Her skin glowed without makeup!” — is not that it’s bizarrely, anachronistically sexist.  Of course it is bizarrely, anachronistically sexist, it is appearing in a magazine which — desultory long thinky political profiles aside — basically exists to showcase female celebrities’ artistically-photographed wet-tshirt-clad areaolae.

Also it’s by Maureen Dowd.

So nope, not shocked that it’s sexist!  I’m shocked that it’s BORING.  Post Palin-impersonation, two seasons into 30 Rock, I don’t need to read about whether Tina Fey plans to have another baby, and I’m not fascinated to learn that her husband “cooks and sews,” and I don’t care whether she eats a cupcake.  I want to read a story of her success that admits that her success isn’t a fluke based on changes in her appearance. I want to read a story that acknowledges the possibility that the changes in her appearance are a fluke necessitated by her success.   I want someone to ask Tina Fey interesting questions, because she’s a genius, and I’m sure she finds making self-deprecating jokes about the size of her ass as boring we find reading them.

Man, if this is the best magazines can do then they deserve to die.

(Also thanks Lindsay)

I figured out how to get the pictures I take with my phone off my phone today!

November 30th, 2008

sexinthegorod.jpg

This is one of two pictures that I took in Russia — the other is of a nondescript building with some parked cars in front of it.  I am a hopeless failure at documenting my life via photos, it turns out.  It’s probably for the best. Anyway this photo depicts the corner of a newsstand in the Sheremetyevo airport.  A few feet away, a group of people stood around a smokers’ counter with vents and ashtrays built into it, smoking.  Yes, smoking in the airport! Season One Carrie Bradshaw would’ve approved.  Speaking of, yes that is a magazine called Sex and the City.

(Also yes that is my Wallabee-clad foot.  I like to wear my Wallabees when I travel.  Critics suggest that my Wallabees are just hideous as Uggs, but note that Ghostface Killah did not ever write a song about Uggs.)

Chuck and Blair Going To The Movies

November 28th, 2008

I have these three beautiful blonde girl cousins who are 12, 15, and 18 years old and we generally like all the same movies and TV shows.

Like a lot of childless unmarried adults my age I tend to think of myself on some semiconscious level as a perpetual teenager, but then when I’m confronted with actual teenagers I realize not only that I am an adult, I am also a member of a completely different generation and fitted with a completely different make and model of brain than today’s teenagers. My cousins have been texting and IMing constantly since they were little kids and they’re used to being in constant contact with, or at least constantly available to, a roster of friends, something that will always seem invasive and foreign and like “work” to me. But maybe that’s not a generational thing as much as it is a personality or a maturity thing, like, I am kind of over chatting. Jonathan Franzen is right, I think, that people fiddle with their handheld communication devices as they used to fiddle with their lighters and cellophane pack wrappers and the result is a lot of messages that don’t say anything. People talk without saying anything IRL too, of course: “They don’t have any information I need,” someone recently told me while explaining why he wasn’t about to strike up a friendship with a group of perfectly niceish people he’d met. You get to a certain age and you become more selective about what information you need. Or maybe you just become more of an asshole? In-person small talk serves some purpose, and can turn into big talk with the aid of the little gestural cues that virtual communication strips away. Small talk online remains small, relegated to a little bubble in the corner of the screen. You’ll never be more reminded of language’s inadequacy than when you’re gchatting with someone halfway around the world and what you most want to say could be communicated better with the slightest touch.

The culture of the constant text update is the putative foundation of the tv show Gossip Girl. Loving this critically acclaimed CW-network ratings disaster is one of the things my girl cousins and I have in common, but I think we might appreciate the show for different reasons. For them, the show is a drama about teenagers’ social lives. For me, the show is a sci-fi epic, taking place, as it does, in an alternate-dimensional version of New York. To enter GGNY, you cross the Manhattan Bridge and arrive in Williamsburg, where hard-luck cases live in palatial lofts and the Brooklyn Inn is run by a 50 year old jazzman who knew Joe Kennedy during Prohibition. From there, you zip up (somehow! Transition b-roll never shows the subway, only gorgeous aerial views of the skyline. Maybe you fly!) to an Upper East Side where parents are as concerned as dowagers in an Edith Wharton novel with the business of allying the teenage scions of their families. All of these people are constantly getting text messages from a mysterious online social chronicler (the titular Girl). It’s like it’s 2008, 1990, 1890 and 1962 simultaneously! Also everyone is wearing truly ridiculous outfits and four pounds of makeup at all times.

But while I like Gossip Girl because it’s surreal and hilarious, my cousins like it because they’re actually following its soap opera plotlines (which are, they acknowledge, ridiculous, but still). They hate Serena van der Woodsen, the show’s blonde ‘star,’ who has transformed, this season, from social pariah — she had some sex, and also maybe accidentally killed a man! — to Page Six-worthy socialite. And they love brunette Blair Waldorf, the evil yet adorable ‘Queen Bee’ of fictional Constance Billiard High. The Blair-Serena rivalry is the show’s supposed dramatic backbone, and now it plays out in actual NY as well as GGNY: Leighton Meester, who plays Blair, ill-advisedly gave Us Weekly the exclusive on her rags-to-riches success story in exchange for a week on its cover, while Blake Lively, who plays Serena, is spending this month on the giant glossy cover of W. The show, like its predecessor ‘The O.C.,’ will go on exploring every possible permutation of hookup between its comically tiny group of central cast members – heartthrob Nate Archibald has already found himself passed around to all four of the show’s female leads – until it gets canceled, but the real nail-biter is the battle to see who will be famous. Things might seem like they’re working out for Blake Lively now, but hmm, what’s Mischa Barton up to these days? No, while Lively and Meester may be stiff competitors in the realm of Most Totally Ridiculous 90s-Child Name Ever, there is no question in this viewer’s mind about who’ll still get covers in the post-aught era. Meester’s portrayal of flip, frank, entitled sexuality – “I’m just finishing something!” she calls out airily to the maid who’s caught her masturbating – is the second most compelling thing on the show. The most compelling thing, of course, is Chuck Bass.

It’s not even like Ed Westwick, who plays Chuck, is such a good actor! His foppish, manipulative high-school dark prince, who loves hookers and drinking before noon and pocket squares and sneaking up on you in a limo and then slowly rolling the window down in order to leer, is a sloppy paste-up job. You just mix Christian Slater in ‘Heathers’ — who was of course imitating Jack Nicholson — and young Ryan Philippe in ‘Cruel Intentions’ — who was of course imitating John Malkovitch in ‘Dangerous Liasons,’ who was imitating a character in a book. But this simple recipe yields a delicious, over-the-top confection: Westwick’s gleefully bad Chuck provides the show with its only moments of laugh out loud funniness. And his natural foil and ideal mate is of course evil Blair. Together, they use cameraphones and trickery to ensnare the show’s more guileless characters, selfconsciously referencing their Valmont-Merteuil source material all the while. But while they seem to belong together, their similarities ultimately keep them apart. Every time Blair makes herself too available, Chuck recoils – ‘You held a certain fascination when you were beautiful, delicate and untouched. But now you’re like…one of the Arabians my father used to own. Rode hard and put away wet,’ he memorably told her near the end of the first season, because she’d slept with one other guy after ecstatically losing her virginity to Chuck in a limo’s backseat.

But this season Chuck has shown a large and improbable soft side, as well as an unlikely amount of self-knowledge. At the season’s outset, Blair refused him because he couldn’t bring himself to say “three little words.” But on a more recent episode, the Blair/Chuck subplot hinged entirely on Blair’s inability to confess her love – and an odd turn of events that transpired after she finally overcame that inability.

At the 56 minute mark, Chuck and Blair find themselves in a clinch with no impediments. But then Chuck has a revelation. “The reason we can’t say those three words to each other isn’t because they aren’t true,” he tells Blair. He is wearing a sage-green suit with contrast piping and a snakeskin-patterned bow tie. “Then why?” she asks. “I think we both know that the moment we do, it won’t be the start of something … it’ll be the end. Think about it. Chuck and Blair, going to the movies. Chuck and Blair, holding hands …”

“We don’t have to do those things,” Blair offers, her voice husky with suppressed tears. “We can do the things that we like!” “What we like is this,” he says. “The game,” she says. He nods. “Without it, I’m not sure how long we’d last. It’d just be a matter of time before we messed it all up.” She looks at him longingly, and he kneels and puts his lips near hers. “I’d rather wait. Maybe in the future …” “I suppose there could be some excruciating pleasure in that,” Blair concedes in a pained, hopeful whisper.

It’s rare to watch a tv show’s writers basically confess that they’ve hit a wall. Imagine if, somewhere around the third season of Friends, Ross had sat Rachel down and said, “You know, we’ll never stay together, because there would really be nothing to hang the misunderstanding-based hijinx of this show on.” When Chuck told Blair that “the game” is “what we like,” he might as well have been staring into the camera and addressing the audience directly. ‘When we finally get together,’ he’s saying, ‘you’ll know that Gossip Girl’s writers have finally gotten that memo from CW headquarters that they’ve got another episode or two to wrap things up.’

But less cynically, or maybe more cynically: the audience basically never gets to watch the ever-after part of romances – it’s boring, we’re given to understand, all that moviegoing and hand-holding. Love affairs have three acts, we know from tv, and even, a little, from our own experience. There’s the thrilling beginning, fraught with obstacles and delicious suffering. And then there’s the middle, the happy normalcy phase that actually maybe doesn’t even exist and is just a slow slide into the mediocrity and boredom that signals the end. Maybe there are just two acts, then.

I wonder what I would make of this show if I were actually in its target demo. On my recent trips up and down the Eastern seaboard I keep seeing this billboard featuring a photograph of a real – but carefully chosen, because if she’s unattractive then the thing becomes a joke – teenage girl. “I don’t give it up … and I’m not giving in,” she tells us, in letters ten feet high. A similar abstinence-themed ad runs sometimes during Gossip Girl: Jenny McCarthy appears and shoves a squalling infant into the arms of a teenage couple who were just about to Do It in the backseat (not of a limo).

I’m glad my teenaged cousins are so smart; I hope very much that they can figure out what all of this stuff is trying to say to them. Personally sometimes it makes me feel like a lady from French literature who Blair Waldorf resembles far more than she does the Marquise de Merteuil – a girl who tried to imagine “just what was meant, in life, by the words ‘bliss,’ ‘passion,’ and ‘rapture’ — words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.”

I will wear the bottoms of my Hypercolor trousers rolled.

November 25th, 2008

At Opening Ceremony right now they have these scarves that change color when you press or blow on them because they’re heat-sensitive — they’re basically this $30 BS stocking stuffer that someone will be disappointed to receive if you gave it to them in an Opening Ceremony bag.  My friend Marisa and I were playing with them near the counter and I made the obvious observation that they were “just like Hypercolor!”

And the beautiful salesgirl was like “What’s Hypercolor?”

Generra Hypercolor tshirts were made of this same heat-sensitive fabric, and while I didn’t own one in 4th grade my cool friend Alison did.  The cool/weird thing about having a Hypercolor shirt was that it gave people carte blanche to come up and plant their hand in the middle of your stomach or chest, because it would make a handprint.  And then everyone would be like “Oooh” while the handprint faded.

The salesgirl didn’t know about this, though, because when I was in fourth grade she was wearing DIAPERS. Not, presumably, Hypercolor diapers.

The next cool thing after Hypercolor was oversized tshirts featuring Looney Tunes characters wearing hip-hop clothing, so maybe that will come back next.

When you mean it I’ll believe it/If you text it I’ll delete it

November 22nd, 2008

Molly Lambert is famous in the New York Times! Make sure to watch the video.

Put a ring on it

November 20th, 2008

Two weekends after same-sex couples lost their right to marry in the state of California, I found myself in Maryland at a wedding ceremony officiated by a lesbian minister. “Throughout history, in every culture all over the world, communities have come together to affirm the power of the marriage bond to build strong families and to celebrate and support love like the love that [X] and [X] feel for each other. By your presence in this room today, you’re signifying your approval and support, not just of [X] and [X], but of marriage as an institution,” she said at the outset of the ceremony.

I squirmed in my seat, the same way I’d squirmed at an engagement party I attended earlier this year when the groom’s father raised his glass and toasted what he viewed “less as a marriage and more of a merger between two families.”

A few nights ago, I met up with my college friend Val. She lives in Philadelphia so I don’t get to see her as often as I’d like. She has a half-sleeve tattoo of Barbarella and recently completed a documentary film about selling her panties online. She also just recently got officially engaged to her longtime boyfriend, as in, they are actually making wedding plans, though they’re the low-key, friend-officiates-and-then-we-all-go-to-a-bar kind. “You don’t have to wear, like, a ring or whatnot,” I asked a few minutes after we first met up. I couldn’t see her left hand — it was was protected, by a mitten, from the wind that was shearing down Fulton St. towards us as we walked to buy wine to bring to the BYOB Senegalese restaurant.

“No no no no,” Val said. “Although sometimes I think I should. Like, I would get hit on by creeps less.”

“The kind of people who you don’t want to be hit on by aren’t going to be put off by a ring,” I said. “And you don’t want to be marked as a man’s, like …” and then we said, in perfect unison, “chattel.”

It was a bizarre moment because, like, how often do you say the word “chattel” aloud? Is it even possible to use it in any other context? “I’m moving, so I’m trying to get rid of a lot of my chattel.” You could say that, I guess: all ‘chattel’ actually means is ‘personal property that isn’t land or buildings.’ ‘Slave’ is only one of the things it could mean.

“That marriage is a failure none but the very stupid will deny,” Emma Goldman wrote in her 1911 treatise ‘Marriage and Love,’ a seriously amazing document that seems at first to differ from more recent takes on the subject only in the statistics it cites (”Since 1870 divorces have increased from 28 to 73 percent”) and in how rosily it imagines a society governed by free love (”Love needs no protection; it is its own protection. So long as love begets life no child is deserted, or hungry, or famished for the want of affection”). Goldman then goes on to indict marriage as an outdated contract that ought to have been displaced by the advent of industrialization, which made women part of the workforce. Now, she writes, women sentimentally cling to the idea that their work outside the home will be obviated by their marriage vows — even though, for all but the richest among them, their vows are just agreements to begin working two jobs instead of one. Women, Goldman reasons, can’t actually be such dupes that they’ll allow this baiting and switching to continue for very much longer! Marriage will be abolished altogether, she predicts, and the result will be Utopian: “What fancy, what imagination, what poetic genius can forsee even approximately the potentialities of such a force in the life of men and women!”

Almost a century later, poetic geniuses are still struggling to forsee a world without marriage, though some are getting closer. Writing about the importance, in the wake of Prop. 8, to transform the discussion about marriage into one about equal rights, the Gay Recluse eloquently explains why he and his partner of 10 years oppose marriage — not just for gays, but for everybody:

In truth, we don’t ever want to get ‘married’; after fleeing the wasteland of suburban America — where every single house featured two people who were or had been married – we have no desire to return to that sad landscape of desperation and conformity. Along the same lines, we have never liked the words “husband” and “wife” and frankly never want them to pass our lips when describing our relationship partner, because these words are indelibly tainted by association with an outdated, homophobic, misogynistic and bourgeois mode of thinking (and society) that has absolutely no appeal to us (except in campy movies and teevee shows).

Heartening, right? But then there’s this kind of thing — from a novel set in contemporary Brooklyn that’ll be published this Spring by a woman whose author bio is careful to mention both her three college degrees and her husband and son. In this scene, a character wakes up in a hospital bed. She’s broken her foot in the terrible bar where she works a second job to support her crazy sister, and a Nice Jewish Doctor who she barely knows but who has had his eye on her and who happened to be in the bar that night has just proposed marriage to her, though they’ve never so much as had coffee.

“It was just unfathomable. Not, she suddenly realized, that he really, actually wanted her to marry him, but that her life could change in an instant, that the grim routines of the past few years — her whole adult life — could be erased in a moment, simply by saying yes.”

Reader, I don’t have to tell you what she decides to do. And she is deliriously happy for the remainder of the book, of course.

****

Since she’s a married lady — married to Jay-Z, duh! — Beyoncé can’t very well sing lyrics like “man on my hips/got me tighter than my Dereon jeans,” anymore, so she has had to create an alternate persona named Sasha Fierce. Sasha performs the half of B’s new double album that’s not treacly, wife-appropriate ballads, and the best of the resulting tracks, ‘Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)’ is not going to start getting played by wedding DJs anytime soon. It’s a feminist anthem! Well, sort of. If you want it to be. It’s a classic post-breakup eff you about being “up in the club” and dancing with another guy to make your ex jealous — “I could care less what you think,” ‘Sasha’ sings, which is always a funny kind of line because, hello, you are making it clear that you’re just acting this way for the dude’s benefit. (cf: “You probably think this song is about you” or “Thanks to you, now I get what I want.”) And then the chorus: an amazing, jumpropey chant of “If you like it then you should have put a ring on it.” In the video the chorus is accompanied by an amazing hip-twitching dance that’s capped by this move where Beyoncé and her backup dancers raise and revolve their left hands, flashing what ought to be conspicuously ringless fingers — “All the single ladies, put your hands up!” But Beyoncé doesn’t just have her famous 5 million dollar diamond — hey, what happened to ‘Sasha?’ — on hers, she’s also got on a whole metal-plated robot glove that makes ominous and addictive and comic-bookish kriiiing sounds when she twists her wrist.

‘Sasha’ wants to be up in the club, acting up, drink in her cup — but she also, badly, wants someone to put a ring on it, or at least she wants someone to want to. It’s like that other song, the Joni Mitchell song I think about every time I walk by that gown store on Atlantic Avenue with that really pretty strapless one in the window. This song is about moving to New York after a breakup and being confronted by all these symbols of happily-ever-after — and about the enduring power that those symbols have, even over someone who knows better. “The ceremony of the bells and lace still veils this reckless fool here,” Joni sings. Also: “the power of reason and the flowers of deep feeling seem to serve me, only to deceive me.”

There’s another song I really like with a great singalong chorus that shifts, from the beginning of the song, from “I’m gonna spend another year alone” to “I’m gonna spend my whole life alone.” When I first heard this song, in high school, I thought this line was just Liz amplifying her earlier point about wanting a boyfriend, all that stupid old shit, letters and sodas. But now I think that maybe this song is about how actually we’re all ultimately going to spend our whole lives alone, even if we’re with someone else. And maybe that’s the most offensive lie of wedding culture, the idea that chanting some spell is going to bind someone to you in a way that makes you permanently not-alone. We come into this world alone and we leave it the same way, and that’s a reality that no vow or dress or $5 million ring can change.

Still, though. Except. However. And yet.