Thursday, November 4, 2010
Hello Kitty Admires The Baby Jesus March 8, 2005
My daughter hasn't quite got the hang of religion yet. She wanted a nativity scene, and we got her one from Saint Vincent DePaul. She called it her Jesus set, and mixed in Hello Kitty and farm and jungle animals. I figure the Mary I grew up with wouldn't mind that much.
Jasmine March 14, 2005
My Night Blooming Jasmine has started to bloom already. I have two big plants in pots in my sun room. I bring them inside in the Fall and put them back out on the porch in the Summer. They've never bloomed this early before. It's amazing to sit in my sun room in the evening, look out at the moonlit snow and smell Jasmine. I just have one little cluster of about 10 flowers on one plant, which is lucky, since my wife hates the smell. But I grew up with it. One whiff transports me back to hot summer nights in Galveston, Texas, reminds me of the warm waters of the Gulf Of Mexico, brings back the heavy scent of the perfume on the necks of the Mexican girls I held in the back seat of my old man's Pontiac. I worry about what kinds of smells my young daughter is going to remember from her childhood, growing up in Wisconsin. Wood fires maybe. Other Winter smells. But Jasmine, too, come to think of it. She loves it. She tears off one flower every night and takes it to her room.
Princess Zyema January 3, 2005
Princes Zyema Velvet Kitten sits on my lap, purring, and kneads my stomach while I consider this post. She slips behind me on the chair, rubbing her face against my back. This is my daughter's cat, rescued from the Humane Society. She's too young to hunt anything except her little, rabbit-fur mice. She leaps into the air, back arched, tail curved, and comes down on them with all four feet. For some reason, she likes to drop them in her water bowl. There are no mice in the garden now. Everything is under 6 inches of snow. Where are the mice? I picture them in their little burrows, sitting in rocking chairs, knitting, sipping tea or smoking pipes. They have no idea what awful deaths await them in the spring.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
5 Cookbooks That Changed My Life
The Talisman Italian Cook Book was my first cookbook. I bought a copy when I moved out of the dorm my first year in college, and I still refer to it now and then.
Ada Boni's recipes were different from the ones my grandmother gave me. Boni uses carrots in her chicken cacciatora. We used celery. We never cooked with wine, and my grandmother skinned the chicken before she browned it.
Mastering The Art Of French Cooking by Julia Child, of course. The only Child recipe I still do is her roasted chicken. She thought roasted chicken was the true test of a cook, and I agree. Except for slow smoking and an occasional bird done standing up with a half-full beer can in its cavity, I don't do whole chickens any other way.
Julia's book led me into French wine, and Alexis Lichine made French wine fun.
The Minimalist Cooks Dinner was my introduction to Mark Bittman.
In the trade-off between time and taste, Bittman strikes just the right balance for me. By now, everybody in the world has linked to Bittman's New York Times article about Jim Leahy's no-knead bread recipe, but one more link can't hurt.
Everyday Greens by Annie Somerville was my bridge into Vegetarian and Vegan cooking.
Express Lane Meals by Rachael Ray is my daughter's cookbook.
Because of Ray and the other Food Network foodies, I have a 10-year-old who eats everything and concocts her own recipes, including interesting dressings, some of them actually edible.
Ada Boni's recipes were different from the ones my grandmother gave me. Boni uses carrots in her chicken cacciatora. We used celery. We never cooked with wine, and my grandmother skinned the chicken before she browned it.
Mastering The Art Of French Cooking by Julia Child, of course. The only Child recipe I still do is her roasted chicken. She thought roasted chicken was the true test of a cook, and I agree. Except for slow smoking and an occasional bird done standing up with a half-full beer can in its cavity, I don't do whole chickens any other way.
Julia's book led me into French wine, and Alexis Lichine made French wine fun.
The Minimalist Cooks Dinner was my introduction to Mark Bittman.
In the trade-off between time and taste, Bittman strikes just the right balance for me. By now, everybody in the world has linked to Bittman's New York Times article about Jim Leahy's no-knead bread recipe, but one more link can't hurt.
Everyday Greens by Annie Somerville was my bridge into Vegetarian and Vegan cooking.
Express Lane Meals by Rachael Ray is my daughter's cookbook.
Because of Ray and the other Food Network foodies, I have a 10-year-old who eats everything and concocts her own recipes, including interesting dressings, some of them actually edible.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
The Flu Formerly Known As Formerly Known As Swine
Apparently, it's now known as Swine again. And we've got a pandemic. The World Health Organization just told its member nations it is declaring a swine flu pandemic — the first global flu epidemic in 41 years.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Films
Alfred North Whitehead once said: "Our knowledge of the particular facts of the world around us is gained from our sensations. We see, and hear, and taste, and smell, and feel hot and cold, and push, and rub, and ache, and tingle. These are just our own personal sensations: my toothache cannot be your toothache, and my sight cannot be your sight." What mathematics does, Whitehead explained, is create a public world that's the same for everybody. Mathematics imagines a world "as one connected set of things which underlies all the perceptions of all people. There is not one world of things for my sensations and another for yours, but one world in which we both exist."
Can film criticism, or any kind of criticism for that matter, discover a world that underlies all the perceptions of all people? And does it matter if it can or not?
Mathematics is essential to the science of bombs, and vaccines, and medicines. It makes architecture and engineering possible. That these things matter is obvious. But do things like films and what we make of them matter in the same way? And to whom do they matter?
Tom Wolfe famously pointed out that without the theories of Rosenberg and Greenberg -- Red Mountain and Green Mountain -- le monde, the little world of artists, dealers and collectors in the Fifties and Sixties, was unable to see. Until you grasped the theories, you saw something all right, but not the "real" paintings. So what? Rosenberg and Greenberg didn't even have the same theory about what they were looking at. They weren't even seeing the same things.
Physicists sometimes think of light as particles. Sometimes they think of light as waves. Neither particles nor waves by themselves explain all there is to know about light, but taken together they do. And that matters. Because the bomb blows up.
What matters about criticism is that it should be useful somehow. A modest goal for a critic might be to make something accessible to a viewer, or listener, or reader, that wouldn't be accessible to them without the critique. And my thought is we should do that without going overboard about the importance of the work we're talking about. We should talk about art the way we talk about mushrooms on our lawns, keeping our heads straight when we swim, finding our way home after a night on the town, or whether we prefer one-egg or two-egg omelettes.
The only thing I can make accessible to anyone is what I remember I saw and heard and thought when I watched a film.
Can film criticism, or any kind of criticism for that matter, discover a world that underlies all the perceptions of all people? And does it matter if it can or not?
Mathematics is essential to the science of bombs, and vaccines, and medicines. It makes architecture and engineering possible. That these things matter is obvious. But do things like films and what we make of them matter in the same way? And to whom do they matter?
Tom Wolfe famously pointed out that without the theories of Rosenberg and Greenberg -- Red Mountain and Green Mountain -- le monde, the little world of artists, dealers and collectors in the Fifties and Sixties, was unable to see. Until you grasped the theories, you saw something all right, but not the "real" paintings. So what? Rosenberg and Greenberg didn't even have the same theory about what they were looking at. They weren't even seeing the same things.
Physicists sometimes think of light as particles. Sometimes they think of light as waves. Neither particles nor waves by themselves explain all there is to know about light, but taken together they do. And that matters. Because the bomb blows up.
What matters about criticism is that it should be useful somehow. A modest goal for a critic might be to make something accessible to a viewer, or listener, or reader, that wouldn't be accessible to them without the critique. And my thought is we should do that without going overboard about the importance of the work we're talking about. We should talk about art the way we talk about mushrooms on our lawns, keeping our heads straight when we swim, finding our way home after a night on the town, or whether we prefer one-egg or two-egg omelettes.
The only thing I can make accessible to anyone is what I remember I saw and heard and thought when I watched a film.
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