Thanks to a free month-long trial subscription to Netflix, I have now watched the entire 5 seasons of Weeds, and season 1 of Californication.
I found this dramatic interlude highly enjoyable. And it got me thinking about the extreme stakes narrative trend that both shows utilize. While both shows are naturalistic, in emotion and character, they flirt with the surreal in their constant crazy heightening of unrealistic stakes and plot. While I personally have never hurled myself out of an airplane, or “gotten air” on skis, sure, I can see the appeal. Likewise, there is a distinct thrill of watching Nancy Botwin (Mary-Lousie Parker) of Weeds decide, upon finding herself confronted with a threatening drug dealer, that a quickie with him by her car is too irresistible to pass up. After a few seasons of Weeds, I found myself thinking, just how far can this possibly go? And go they have, while maintaining just a thread of believability, or at least they are maintaing the suspension of disbelief.
Similarly, Californication has the same surrealistic realism that makes the show both unbelievably enjoyable as in, enjoyable and only barely realistic (LA is like that, but also not like that), but the writers and actors have taken it one step further. David Duchovny’s Hank Moody has an extreme stakes personality. Talk about a thrill.
He is constantly being humiliated and yet never humiliated, never defensive. He owns up to everything, embraces every personal flaw, owns everything, and is indestructible as a result, at least as of season one. It’s breathtaking to watch the imperviousness of a character who never denies who they are and how badly they act. He is in a constant state of hurling himself into the void. He is also hugely successful as a likable character. Deeply flawed, he is fundamentally a good person. (Hooker with a heart of gold, anyone?) He is simultaneously an excessive lover of women, and an excessive lover of womenkind.
I don’t know if the appearance in the mainstream of these kama kazi stories and characters represent a bit of our collective yearning to go loco in the face of our very difficult political, economic and environmental circumstances and the difficult future which seems to loom ahead. Stories have always been useful as a means of throwing ourselves, experientially, into the void, and getting to see how it feels without having to actually climb Mt. Everest with an oxygen tank. And while some actually choose to stand on the mountain top and push off, I am going to stick with the storytelling from those daring writers who imagine themselves there and then dream up what comes next.
Categories: thoughts · trends
Tagged: Californication, character, extreme sports, extreme stakes, high stakes storytelling, plot, void, Weeds
Since I just wrote the blog post that cannot yet be published, I thought I’d share, instead, an excellent and easy way to prepare veggies, although I mostly do it with French green beans, broccoli, or asparagus.
Shallots are small onions that carmelize easily and delisiously.
Slice several shallots. Cut up veggies in the size you want. I usually cut the ends off the beans and cut them once or twice.
Put olive oil (or butter) in a 12 inch skillet (and let me just confess now, that once I got the 12 incher, I stopped using the 10 or 8, even to cook small things. 12 is my go to skillet.)
Throw in shallots, medium heat, let them cook until they are brown. Put in vegetables and cook until it tastes good and they get very green. Add salt.
The crazy thing is, the next day, there are good to the third power–like candy–and never enough left over.
Categories: dude fude · food
Tagged: cooking, dude fude, food, green beans, recipes, shallots
December 23, 2009 · 1 Comment
When I finally purchased my iphone, I felt, and I say this without irony, that I had acquired a new best friend. And while that may reflect a bit (just a bit) on my current life situation, I think many of us have a long history of deep love and admiration for our tools. Good design cannot be underrated in its affect on quality of life. I touch, countless times, that little iphone and enjoy in the doing the task much more than I might.
All this is to say that the immersion blender makes the lentil soup and most soups for that matter. Ah, and the joy of the blend…
However, needing or having to buy an immersion blender flies in the face of the concept for Dude Fude and the ease of making. I assume most people do not, and should not, have this tool.
AND you can wait for your lentil soup to cool and dump it into your regular blender (in stages) or you can eat lentil soup unblended, in which case chop everything very small.
In any case, Lentil soup is easy and delicious. I do these steps fairly casually with imperfect measurements and it always works.
In a big pot, saute 1 large onion with chopped fresh parsley and thyme (or dried if you don’t have fresh) in olive oil or butter.
After about 7 minutes (stirring occasionally), add 1 or 2 chopped carrot (s) and 1 chopped stalk of celery (chop finely if you won’t be blending), and 3 cloves of garlic.
Add 15 oz (1 can of diced tomatoes)
Cook for another 5 or so minutes, scrap up any brown bits from the bottom of the pan
Add 5 cups of water (or chicken broth) and 1 1/2 cups of French (smaller and browner) lentils (wash and check for stones), 1 teaspoon of salt, a couple of bay leaves if you have them.
Cover partially and let cook for 30-35 minutes, until lentils are cooked.
If you’ve got the immersion blender, you can just put that in the hot soup blend (if you are using your regular blender, you’ll need to let the soup cool. I let mine cool, only barely, but hot soup can jump up, so be careful.
Then add more salt to taste and pepper. You can add a 1 tablespoon of sherry (or red wine) vinegar and 1 tablespoon of dijon mustard for kick (although often I leave this last step out.
I freeze what I don’t eat in small batches, because it reheats beautifully.
Enjoy!
Categories: food
Tagged: cooking, dude fude, food, immersion blender, iphones, lentil soup, soups, tools
First you buy a pink hula hoop,
then you start calling it “hooping.” You make a hooping playlist, and finally, you begin putting together the crazy outfit, starting with socks–>
(that yes, you realize should never be worn out in public and will not make the debut outfit…)
I eagerly await my official SF bay area citizenship card. I believe it’s in the mail.
Categories: dancing · thoughts · trends
Tagged: hooping, hula hooping, stripped socks, trends
I started in 2002. Now, I haven’t been writing that whole time. No. And in fact, you don’t even want to know all the crap that’s gone down in the last 7/8 years. Trust me.
The problem is, I keep re-prioritizing what I think are the most important things to do in life. Sometimes I think the book just needs to get written and sometimes I think, why would I waste time writing a book when I could-be-out-having-fun-since-I’m-going-to-die-anyway-and-it-could-be-soon-and-in-that-case-what-will-I-regret-not-doing-the-most…
I could be baking. That gives me a lot of pleasure. I need to find a job and fast (well, I am trying to do that). In that other “lifetime” I think I would have liked to have been a dancer. So, in this one, I do it at least sporadically. (The click of “outside” shoes on a wooden floor as I walk out with my bag banging against my thigh…)
I could be giving back to my community or building one or doing various social things or planning more activities… helping people… Practicing my guitar.
I just read a post by Marc Andreessen (and yes, he has invested in Fluther.com) about maximizing personal productivity. I keep going to back to it, because it’s interesting but also, there’s this incredible whiff of freedom surrounding it. It’s tantalizing. Freedom–I just want to inhale–as if it’s a virus I could catch. I love the days of totally open schedule and that feeling of time, stretching out like one of those slow moving airport walkways ahead, of course, always faster moving then they look.
Now I am trying to be productive in the exact opposite situation, where I know I have a short and very finite period to write something.
All of which brings me around to the point that the book isn’t finished although people keep saying, are you sure because “perfect can get in the way of good.” Or finishing. Very true. But still, I laugh uncomfortably and say, “Uh… yes, I am sure.”
Regarding finishing the book though, there’s a missing piece and I just had this idea about love and the lubricating nature of love (and I haven’t yet thought of an analogy), and something about the Heisenberg principle too, and how the structure of the book has a similar effect in that it affects the characters or the the central character as it progresses. Cannot be seen and unaffected, right, structure connecting to meaning, form influencing function. It’s on my mind.
So, yes, I am writing a book, but first, I’m going to yoga.
Categories: thoughts
Tagged: books, fluther, Marc Andreessen, productivity, storytelling, thoughts, time management, writing
September 21, 2009 · 2 Comments
You may or may not have had occasion to read Frog and Toad Are Friends recently. However, if you are like me, and have a young child, you may have read it hundreds of times in the last few months.
And happily so.
The Frog and Toad series, by British author, Arnold Lobel, are among the children’s books that one can read repeatedly and still enjoy, or at least tolerate, or at least not totally loathe.
In fact, I love Frog and Toad and especially Frog and Toad Together. The stories are good, the characters relatable, and the endings are brilliant. Enviable. Analysis-worthy.
But let’s start with two excellent characters, long time bffs. Frog is the elder statesman, the more responsible, more reliable, wiser character with Toad, his immature, ill-mannered, ill-temperated, often neurotic and, of course, good-hearted best friend. Toad is usually suffering through some lesson, something which more often than not, he does not appreciate. My daughter has often said, you’re Frog and I’m Toad, and tonight when I asked her who her best friend was, she said, “You.” So, I guess, I’m still Frog, which is kind of funny, since I relate more to Toad, despite my being older and wiser.
Cookies, a story about Frog and Toad binging on delicious cookies that Toad has baked, ends with Frog giving all the cookies to the birds in order for them to gain willpower. Toad rejects this concept announcing that Frog can keep the willpower–he is going home to bake a cake.
Almost every story is a juicy little nugget; shaped perfectly, with just the appropriate amount of plot and character development to make them full bodied and delicious. And the endings… I don’t want to use the word perfect, but, they really are.
They often end with “place,” like, “The hands of the clock moved to show the hours of a merry Christmas Eve.” Or, “Then they sat in the shade of a large tree and ate their chocolate ice-cream cones together.” “They ran around the corner of Frog’s house to make sure that spring had come again.” In one, Toad has the last word, “Winter may be beautiful, but bed is much better.”
I think my favorite is from The Letter (Frog and Toad are Friends): “Toad was very pleased to have it.” It really comes down to a mixture of closure and uplift. It’s just so damn satisfying. You feel as good as Toad getting his first and probably last letter (sent to him by Frog, of course). Just two best friends feeling as content as can be, as right in their little world as conceivably possible. The best part is, Frog has already told Toad the contents of the letter, because he has to convince him to wait for it, being, as it is, delivered with interminable slowness, by snail. But they actually end up enjoying the wait because they share the knowledge of the contents of the letter. Togetherness is a big happy theme too. But I digress. I mean, what more can I really say?
Toad was very pleased to have it.
Categories: mommies · stories worth repeating
Tagged: best children's stories, endings, Frog and Toad All Year, Frog and Toad Are Friends, Frog and Toad Together, mommies, reviews, storytelling
Tom Roma, my photography prof at Columbia, told us: people always feel good when they see a sunset, even if it’s a photograph, and even if the photo is in black and white. It still makes them feel good.
Yes?
just a hint
Categories: thoughts
Tagged: psychology, stories, storytelling, sunset
September 16, 2009 is the 10 year anniversary of my father’s death. He did not live to see the 21st century; he did not know that the twin towers would be attacked and that they would fall. He would not have necessarily welcomed the digital age. I guess there are many things that each of us will never know.
If you asked my father what he did, he liked to say that he taught college. He was not a professor, he was, Don, a teacher. Not always perfect, but always learning, always embracing his path and encouraging me to skip along mine. I think no more so than, with fearlessness and pure heart, he faced his own death. “Are you afraid,” I asked. “No,” he said, “just curious.”
I was with him 2 hours before he actually died. They tell you to say goodbye, to say that it’s okay to die and that you’ll be okay when they pass. All these things to make it easier for the person to “let go.” Cancer, being the aggressive bastard that it is, wasn’t likely going to be influenced by what I said or didn’t say, but I said everything anyway.
Fourteen months earlier, I had arrived at his hospital bed. “Have I given you enough?” he asked.
Many words have been written and spoken about my father. At the funeral, students I didn’t know approached me: “You were the apple of his eye,” they said. And six months later, students running the ticket booth at the local movie theater looked at me strangely, “We know who you are, and we loved your father.”
There was one piece (Craig Carlson Eulogy) written about him that I have always especially loved. Penned by Craig Carlson, poet, teacher and long-time colleague of my father’s, the essay had story, memory, surprise, reveal. It was an excavation of history, with them sitting in the backyard of the old house with the bees. As with any good story, if perfectly captures who my father was and it revealed extra words and thoughts he had, which, like the fragments of ancient pottery, are precious beyond explanation.
A few years later, later Craig drowned, and there was a story told about it. He and his teenage son had been swimming, maybe out a little too far and then the current had taken them out further. They knew they were in trouble. Craig was tired, and told his son to swim back without him. His son didn’t want to leave him. “Get help,” said Craig. And so the son swam back and was saved.
Not, save yourself. Not, just go on without me. Get help. A task. A reason to survive. A charge to save the life of someone else. It’s Muhammad Ali winning Rumble in the Jungle–fighting not just for himself but for his community. Something greater than oneself.
Get help.
For 10 years I have missed my father, but I have cherished the legacy he left behind and I am deeply grateful to Craig, a poet to the end, for his words.
***
Check out my father’s book: Teaching with your Mouth Shut.
Also, his as of yet unpublished, Out of the cave; steps to essay writing.
Categories: Stories worth considering · thoughts
Tagged: Craig Carlson, Don Finkel, great stories, In Memory, legacy, Rumble in the Jungle, storytelling, Teaching with your Mouth Shut, thoughts, words, words matter
Can one desire too much of a good thing?
Shakespeare poses this question in As You Like It (Act IV, Scene I ) through Rosalind and the idea come very much into our vernacular. I couldn’t resist the google search.
It’s one of the those questions that has an obvious, knee jerk first answer and then a deeper second one.
Thinking I had answered–for myself, anyway–the chocolate chip cookie question, I was forced the other day, due to an absence of brown sugar, to deviate from my tried and true method and improvise. A few days later I served the cookies, straight from the freeze, for dessert to my brother and his girlfriend.
Brother’s girlfriend: These are possibly the best cookies I’ve ever eaten. I love the texture of them frozen. But, I generally like burnt cookies so, maybe that’s it… There’s something a little…
Me: …bitter about them?
Brother: But I don’t like burnt cookies at all, and I love the deliciousy goodness of these. (Digression to the time I accidentally caramelized ghee, making the world’s most delicious butter spread.)
Brother’s girlfriend: Finally, a cookie we can agree on.
They clasp hands.
Spurred on by such enthusiastic eaters, I decided to make another variation of the cookies.
This time, I omitted brown sugar again, and added an equal amount of raw honey as white sugar. I also used two kind of chocolate (Callebaut 60% and Scharffenberger 70%) for the “chips” part.
The molasses variation uses 1/4 cup of molasses and 1 cup of white sugar. I used the Guittard chocolate chips for this batch.
Because: can you really desire too much of good thing?
Categories: food
Tagged: as you like it, callebaut, chocolate chip cookies, classic stories, cooking, dude fude, great stories, guittard, scharffenberger, shakespeare, variations
