Monday Miscellany November 2, 2009

I’m already mourning the passing of the Season of Wearing Cute Dresses in a pretty hardcore way. Yuck. Forgive that I already posted a picture of this outfit (which I have christened “You’d Never Guess She’s a Man-Hating Anarcho-Feminist,”), but I did a lot of tailoring to it to make it fit (there was a LOT more lace) and I’m pretty much in love with it. Those tights have little twee hearts on them!

Lots happening out there in the world, plus I am over my horrid mood of last week! Let us celebrate with links:

My BFFF (extra F for how Fucking much I love him) Than Luu is doing some ridiculous food blogging on his travels around the world with his band Black Gold (Oh look! Another opportunity to mention the music video I was in, how handy!). Check it out!

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Speaking of bands, while I was engaged in a horrible Halloween depression spiral, my sweetheart was in Louisville mixing THIS. Wow.
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Profanity-laced hilarity courtesy of McSweeney’s.

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The new Bloodroot calendar is out! In the two years since Bloodroot published the gorgeous cookbook set that I was honored to have had a hand in creating, they have been publishing a calendar with new recipes. The calendar is super gorgeous and filled with 99% vegan recipes straight out of my mentor Selma’s head–snap it up!

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I’m happy one of the Brooklyn Jonathans (Safran Foer, Ames, and Letham) wrote a book about why you should be vegan or whatevs, and I’m happy that famous blonde actresses are writing vegan cookbooks, all of that is well and good. But these books are written for non-vegans—why people have to keep pointing them out to me I have no idea.

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Speaking of another of the Bklyn Jonathans, Ames wrote that new show Bored to Death and though I haven’t seen it I completely loved & agreed with Nancy Franklin’s recent New Yorker review (I basically agree with everything Nancy Franklin has ever said though.). Particularly this part:

Chick lit—the range of fiction by women about contemporary city life, friendships, sex, jobs, climbing out of the wreckage of youthful dreams—gets a lot less respect than the male equivalent, which people tend to approach as if it were automatically more artful, more written. Women write “thinly veiled accounts”; men write “romans à clef.” Women writers may have a room of their own, but men who thrash around in front of the mirror and record their every failure, humiliation, moue, and excretion for an audience’s consumption still own the house, even if all they do in it is lie on the couch—and then write about it.
The work of Jonathan Ames, who created the new HBO series “Bored to Death,” lies in this vein of self-fascination and self-conscious inertia.

My god, YES. I suffered through a Jonathan Ames audiobook (which I refuse to Google to figure out the title, as I am unwilling to spend one more second of my life on Jonathan Ames) once, and every second was pure torture.

On the other hand, everyone says this new series is good. Oh, the pain.

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And a few work-related miscellanies:

Heya Baltimorites (?)! Check out Brunie’s Bakery, a cute small-batch vegan bakery in your fair city. Recently their head baker emailed me to say that she was making the wedding cake for the woman who ordered the aforementioned wedding truffles from last week and she just sampled and adored a few truffles. How nice is that? I love it when things like that happen. Vegans can be a crazy bunch, but overall we are such decent, sweet, friendly people, no?

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(All that follows is NSFW!)

So, this erotic chocolate shop in Belgium wants to sell ye olde vulvaz, and I hope we can make it happen. How hilarious does it look? My favorite product so far is the “Candy Gay String.” And while I find these deeply, deeply horrifying….I must say they are pretty well done! And they remind me all over again to be annoyed that no one (Beloved TCHO! Are you listening?) makes high-quality vegan (coco milk!!!) milk chocolate and white chocolate. Oh, and I have this mold! I once made it for my sweetheart filled with peppermint patty filling and presented it to him right before he left on a tour. It was too much sugar (a solid inch or so of peppermint patty filling, I’m not sure quite what I was thinking) and he couldn’t eat it in front of anyone and I fear a lot of it went to waste. But it was adorable!

Monday Miscellany: beaucoup de mishegoss edition October 19, 2009

Strataspore: “A platform for collective knowledge about mushrooms.”

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Spend an adorable and seriously heartwarming 20 minutes with this Brooklyny hipstery awesomey shortie, all about abortion!

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FUCK YEAH: Barbara Ehrenreich on how “positive thinking has undermined America.” Yep. Totes!! My god, I loves me some Barbara Ehrenreich.

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This entire blog will terrify and fascinate you, I promise. Veronica turned me onto it because in this post this seriously mentally insane person explains how many of the little globule-y things I had at Alinea were made. Wowzers.

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This Calvin Trillin gem that so perfectly sums up the Roman Polanski mishegoss has been passed around a bit, but in case you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a peek and an “EXACTLY.”

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An anarchist’s take on Michael Moore’s new anti-capitalist movie.

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Little bit o’ Bonbons press (the blog is also my personal scrapbook, OK?)….

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Oh, and here is the cutest, (and also most bizarrely inaccurate) piece o’ Bonbons press ever.(I wouldn’t exactly say that I “made the chocolates in part as a response to friends who voiced their opinion that no one else but Obama could have won the Nobel Peace Prize” though yep, I did have a conversation with someone who said that and yep, I did point out that Vandana should have received it instead, but man, that would have been quick to whip up an entire choco line! But whatevs, that’s a minor quibble in a sweet article.)

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Brittany pointed me to these cute vintagey threads. Oh Etsy, je t’adore.

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Our local distillery, Tuthilltown Spirits, is now incredibly famous, and deservedly so. Their Baby Bourbon and Manhattan Rye Whiskey are RIDIC. Hooray for local hooch!

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I found out about this sweet teeny jam company from Edible Brooklyn–how adorable: Anarchy in a Jar jams. How amazing to be alive when anarchists are practicing their politics by making jam.

It warms my heart, yo.

why are artisans so often assholes? October 14, 2009

Have you noticed this? That people who are really deeply good at what they do and are doing it to the Nth degree are so often serious assholes?

If you’ve been to, oh, I don’t know, let’s just say….Brooklyn, then you know of what I here speak. Awesomeness overshadowed by self-awareness of awesomeness, which then tips said awesomeness into the realm of insufferability. We’ve come to accept it with writers, painters, movie directors, but in my life I see it a lot with small business owners. The ones who are doing the most awesome shit are so often also the most stuck-up and annoying.

My work is to be at once awesome and not assholey, and it’s harder than you can possibly imagine.

Seriously. The struggle not to be an asshole takes up roughly half of my mindspace on any given day. I come from a family comprised almost solely of giant assholes, and I live in today’s giantly assholely world. I am both made of and swim around in assholely molecules every minute of every day.*

Despite that, I think it’s fair to say that I am not, on balance, an asshole. I think about this all the time, and here’s what I’ve figured out: I think (I hope) I have struck this weirdly awesome balance in my life: I am at once the most intense and angry person I know as well as one of the most sweet. Can this be? Can I continue like this? I really want to, I really like this balance. Not letting the anger overtake the sweetness, not letting the sweetness trickle into treacle.

I am deeply hard, I have harsh political views, I am sometimes overly brash in my resistance to compromise, and being forced to bear witness to most people’s lives, beliefs, and activities engenders in me feelings ranging from disinterest to literal revulsion to screaming rage.

On the other hand: I work hard at cultivating loving relationships with those I love; at deeply enjoying the pleasure of being alive; and at opening my heart to the many breathtaking wonderfulnesses my life provides.

I like talking about it, and trusting good friends who will tell me when the balance is a little off. I like that I can sometimes sort of put my sanity into other people’s hands, letting them feel the heavy weight of it and asking them plainly: “OK? Sane?” And they can nod and smile and reassure me that my anger is healthy,** or take my hand and ignore me when I blow up and take a walk and tell me I’m being, quite literally, insane.

A lot of this is related to work. Let me tell you a story.

There is a bakery in the town in which my commercial kitchen is located. I have heard many, many stories about the baker who owns this bakery. For example, a few months ago I linked to a police report about him wandering around a street festival without trousers, with his junk all on display. (That really doesn’t bother me, I’m just painting a picture for you. I like people’s junk being on display, actually. It sort of adds value to my day to know that weirdo bakers are getting drunk at small-town street festivals and possibly scarring children for life with their wrinkly junk.***)

In every story I’ve ever heard about this baker, the phrase “what an asshole!” is invariably used. The story about the time my sweetheart tried to get a vegan hot chocolate. The many many stories from my sous chef, who continues going there seemingly only to collect bizarre stories (I should state that she is too sweet to actually call him an asshole, but that’s her sentiment, I can tell). The friends of mine who ordered a wedding cake from him and somehow things got so angry that they asked another friend to pick up the cake because they knew they would get into a fist fight if they saw him. Etc. Ad infinitum.

I had never been to this bakery. I bake my own bread and work around the corner, where there is always good, free food waiting for me. But on a recent weekend I was poking around town with a friend and he wanted to get a coffee**** and a sandwich on good bread, so we ventured in.

Within two minutes I was so incredibly angry that my friend and I spent the next few hours analyzing the interaction second-by-second, with me tracing each strain of anger back to a specific ill-placed word, dark look, snobbish turn of phrase, infuriating sentence.

My friend wasn’t particularly bothered. He was happy that some sort of eggy sandwich he got was appropriately-sized (“Only one egg!” and I should state that he charged him .25 more for an egg that wasn’t born in hell, which is, I suppose, good on balance.)  and he also ate the second half of my sandwich, which was incredibly tasty (I’m a half-sandwich eater, OK?*****).

That’s the thing: everything was good. The food was just lovely. Made with care, if not exactly love. When ordering my sandwich, I misunderstood the vegan options on the menu and apparently ordered wrong. I was sternly told that my off-the-menu sandwich creation was “not recommended” and looked upon like a speck of dust who couldn’t put together a good sandwich if my life depended on it. The baker went on and on about why that sandwich wouldn’t be good and why I should order the sandwich on the menu—which is what I was trying to do.

In the end I got all icy and sternly said: “Just give me the best. vegan. sandwich. you. can. make.” and he respected that, both the iciness and the request for quality, as I had a feeling he would.

I won’t go into the many more details of insultingness and irksomeness. It was a feeling that permeated the place.

“He’s a good baker, he’s just not good with customers,” said my friend. He didn’t get why I was annoyed.

“Well he shouldn’t FUCKING DEAL WITH CUSTOMERS if he’s going to insult them all day long.” I replied.

This is, of course, why I do not have a shop that is open to the public: I am not good at dealing with customers. I would critique people’s orders, talk down to them, get visibly annoyed by their food stupidity. I know this about myself, and I sequester myself appropriately. I am largely cloistered. I rarely answer the telephone. This is good for me. I have found a way to navigate through my annoying snobbishness and holier-than-thouity to a decent career doing what I love. (The internet is my medium, I bow to its barriers.)

The thing is: the baker was toeing a line I very much like: he runs his business with principles other than money making at its heart. Clearly he cares more for quality than kindness, and I completely respect that. The place reminds me a lot of my beloved Bloodroot: resolutely individual. Going to Bloodroot for the first time can be frustrating because there are no waitresses and the ordering system is quirky, but the owners are aware of this and walk everyone through the process. Unlike almost every restaurant in the world, they treat you like a person, not a “customer.” I love this. It is the world I want to live in.

You’re not treated like a customer at the bakery, either. You’re treated like a potential enemy who must be conquered. This I do not love.

The baker is an artisan: I’m sure he works with razor-thin margins, I know he bakes everything from scratch, I’m sure he puts in the effort to make everything he does worth doing. People do not like this. They like and want cheap shit, and when you give them something other than cheap shit they are confused and quickly become annoyed, as do you after you explain for the six hundredth time why you cook the way you do, why things take a little longer because you make them from scratch, why your bread won’t last for weeks and weeks.

This work of quality artisanship is very, very annoying. You’re taking one little string and trying to pull the entire world over to you with it. Sometimes it breaks, and that makes you angry.

We make our choices. I understand mine, I understood Bloodroot’s, and I understand the baker’s. I don’t understand McDonalds, I don’t understand Starbucks. I like mine, I like Bloodroot’s, and the baker’s make me angry.

Balance is the thing, I suppose. Balancing our love of artisanship and all that it entails with a love of life that prevents us from succumbing to assholery. I guess I’ll keep on keepin’ on, trying to balance my beloved anger with sweetness, keeping my head down, working hard, trying to have compassion for those also on my path.

Meh.******

*I just had a long conversation with myself (in my head, thankfully) about whether or not calling people assholes is sort of anti-gay, just as I try not to call people pussies unless they are, you know, doing something awesome (I went through a phase of calling people “fucking cunts” when they did awesome things, but somehow it didn’t take, I have no idea why.). For some reason I have absolutely no compunction about calling people dicks since I very much enjoy insulting men, but calling people assholes seems a teeny bit insulting specifically to my beloved fags. After I went around and around this in my head, I finally came to the conclusion that it’s OK to call people assholes because let’s face it: shit comes out of an asshole, that fact cannot change.

(And here my partner is reading my blog in his bunk on his bus on his phone right before bed, and is dying a little bit inside because of my bathroom humor. I can hear his sigh these many states away. Alas! We can’t all be Mr. Integrity!)

**Which brings me to my Best Facebook Status Update of the Week. Are you ready to be blown away? Here goes: “My anger is a guava kombucha: sometimes healthy, sometimes explosive, always pink, always on the verge.” yesssssssssss.

***I think we can all agree that calling people’s bits “junk” is sort of rad for reasons no one can really explain, no?

****I’ve started saying “a coffee” instead of “a cup of coffee” or “some coffee.” I like it and feel it somehow sounds more European. Don’t you think? (I don’t actually drink coffee myself, but jump in on people’s conversations about which of the 40 coffeehouses in my town has the best coffee all the time. You didn’t need to know any of this.)

*****This is the post full of things no one cares about or needs to know!

******If you are wont to compare my writing style to that of the dearly departed David Foster Wallace because of all my parenthetical asides and footnotes, PLEASE DO.

“Slow Dance” by Matthew Dickman October 10, 2009

More than putting another man on the moon,
more than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga,
we need the opportunity to dance
with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance
between the couch and dining room table, at the end
of the party, while the person we love has gone
to bring the car around
because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart
if any part of us got wet. A slow dance
to bring the evening home, to knock it out of the park. Two people
rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant.
A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey.
It’s a little like cheating. Your head resting
on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck.
Your hands along her spine. Her hips
unfolding like a cotton napkin
and you begin to think about how all the stars in the sky
are dead. The my body
is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained Melody,
Stairway to Heaven, power-chord slow dance. All my life
I’ve made mistakes. Small
and cruel. I made my plans.
I never arrived. I ate my food. I drank my wine.
The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like children
before they turn four. Like being held in the arms
of my brother. The slow dance of siblings.
Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him,
one of my great loves, he is absolutely human,
and when he turns to dip me
or I step on his foot because we are both leading,
I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer.
The slow dance of what’s to come
and the slow dance of insomnia
pouring across the floor like bath water.
When the woman I’m sleeping with
stands naked in the bathroom,
brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit
into the sink. There is no one to save us
because there is no need to be saved.
I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed
the front yard. When the stranger wearing a sheer white dress
covered in a million beads
comes toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life,
I take her hand in mine. I spin her out
and bring her in. This is the almond grove
in the dark slow dance.
It is what we should be doing right now. Scrapping
for joy. The haiku and honey. The orange and orangutan slow dance.

Monday Misc: inadequate eyelashes [Friday] edition October 9, 2009

Some rapidly aging links I’ve been hoarding for a while:

In the ideas-change-over-time category, I’d like to publicly state that this article from Feministing has officially changed my mind about Zero Population Growth and the idea that trying to get people (i.e., women) to have less babies (which I still think is a splendid idea) is the very best way to accomplish environmental goals.

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Sweet seed librarian Ken has a good article all about—what else?—seed saving here at Civil Eats, which is a pretty rad site overall, actually.

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I didn’t mention this on the blog because it was pretty upsetting, but now things have calmed down a bit, so here we go: my best friends Noel and Selma’s restaurant, Bloodroot, was robbed a few weeks ago. Selma was slightly injured when she confronted the robber because he was stealing her precious knitting bag (which he most likely thought was a purse). Selma and I had a good chat about the whole thing last week, and she seems to be back to her serene, bizarrely-energetic, beloved self. Here’s a piece of our exchange:

“So, anyway, the day after the whole thing we were scheduled to go to our Weavers Guild [which is exactly what it sounds like]…”

[at this point, after Sel has told me the story of how she basically attacked this robber and a serious melee resulted, all I can think is: "Wouldn't you want to just stay in bed the next day?"]

“…and, you know, I figured, what am I going to do, just stay in bed all day? So we went.”

That’s my Selma.

You have to register to read the articles, but you can pretty much get the gist of what happened here and here’s a nice blog post about it (in the end she recovered the knitting bag, can you believe that? A kid apparently found it in the water while fishing!).

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Ready to be completely blown away by a product that is the absolute epitome, the perfect zenith, the utter apex of that age-old dynamic duo of capitalism + misogyny? I bring you: latisse. Warning: “there is potential for increased brown iris pigmentation which is likely to be permanent.” Um, this shit is gonna stain your eye?

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And sorry to end on a downer, but have you heard about Condé Nasty ruthlessly murdering Gourmet? I know it’s not vegan (though their “Vegetarian Tonight” column pretty much rocked it), but it’s by far the best food magazine out there…argh, it was. I’m really broken up about it. Now Gourmet subscribers are doing to get stupid idiotic stultifying Bon Appetit—LORD HELP US ALL.

The Last Supper October 3, 2009

Here are a few snaps from The Last Supper, the art show I was in last weekend in Brooklyn! There were so many amazing works on display—I took pictures of a few, but you can check them all out in more depth online here.

Artist statement card thingie

workin’ it…

awww…

Housing projects made out of graham crackers, complete with boarded-up windows, chimneys, and fences—how great are these??

utterly gorgeous sugar cookies

unbelievable sugar sculpture of a vase and swiss chard leaves

rice and beans!

in which I officially admit to liking something a dude did September 24, 2009

Happy fall, darlings!

I happen to hate fall, but I take it that apart from me (and blogreader Brittany—to me she is BFF Brittany, but you probably know her as blogreader Brittany) fall is universally beloved, so have at it. It’s pretty, I’ll give you that. And it seems that some people actually like dead things littering every inch of the earth that you have to painstakingly capture and discard, so I hope those weirdos are really living it up (and when you’re done living it up at your place, please feel free to come over to mine and do some raking, for I am already behind).

I’ve been busy cooking and chocolatizing and preparing to have a few friends over this weekend for fried green tomatoes (East Coast peeps: go to any farmer tomorrow and I guarantee they will give you all the green tomatoes you can haul away—go!)  then the Last Supper art show thingie on Saturday–busy week! If you’re in the Brooklyn area be sure to come check it out. I am totally tickled that I am officially an “artist” (because everyone knows that what makes you an artist is being called one online).

I had a bunch of tryouts for the poem I’d be writing in chocolate for the Last Supper event, and finally settled on a Susan Griffin number called “Bread.” It’s pretty, and it fits on a large sheet pan that will fit in the back of my car, which is apparently what I look for in poetry these days. You might remember Susan Griffin as the author of the seminal ecofeminist text Woman and Nature—I had no idea she was a poet until I stumbled across a book of her collected poetry at my friendly local bookshop (discounted to $6 because of a stain on the spine I am resolutely telling myself has to be coffee).

One of the runners-up for the choco poem was pretty much anything by Matthew Dickman, my current poet crush. In the end I had to rule anything of his out because I couldn’t find a suitable poem that was the requisite sheet-tray length, but I’ve been mightily enjoying his one and only book, All-American Poem.

My god, what a giantly sweet mass of cotton candy of a treat this little collection is. You can read it like a novel and it’s just as tasty as if you read each poem slow like an English major, coaxing out all the allusions and flourishes. And it’s magnificently, generously sexy too—as sexy as the author photo on the back, which is saying a lot.

I’ve been walking around for about a week now whispering Matthew Dickman wonderfulness, feeling the special deep-down happiness that only taut lines strung together in surprising and ultra-clever ways can create. My sweetheart, a dude who bore witness to me spending the last two years of college only reading women poets and who didn’t bat an eye when I literally segregated our books by gender and put all the feminist books and poetry in a separate room so they could “breathe,” has been amused by the whole thing.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say you liked a poem by a guy before,” he said, all bemusedly and shit, the other day. He’s probably right. No one says they like Shakespeare (verily though, I do, and I have the iPhone app that proves it) or T.S. Eliot (do I dare disturb the universe? In truth, though I very much like Eliot, my thoughts about him are mostly in the “I wonder what Virgina Woolf really thought of him?” vein. In truth, I very much wonder what Virginia would think or did think about a great many things in a week…is this weird? To wonder what Woolf would make of Facebook? I would so like to know.) When Jacob’s not home and I can’t sleep I read Rimbaud in French out loud to my cats…and that’s about it. A little Donald Hall here, a dash of Mark Strand there (you know: ‘Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.’)  that one W. S. Merwin book about Hawai’i—done with dudes.

Dudes are usually such fantastically boring poets, you know? But the ladies: my Adrienne Rich first and foremost, then that sad old Plath who will never get out of my head because she does not do you do not do any more black shoe & I’ll probably be mumbling about eating men like air on my deathbed, and Denise Levertov and Joy Harjo, Haunani-Kay Trask and of course the doomed Sexton, my BFFFF Dorothy Parker and her polar opposite,  Emily Dickinson. Audre Lorde Audre Lorde Audre Lorde. Marge Piercy and Grace Paley and yeah, now and then, maybe just a little Katha Pollitt too. Katherine Mansfield and Anais Nin. Be still my heart, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, Christina Rosetti and Nikki Giovanni and Phyllis Wheatley and even good old Sappho, sure. Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton and Carolyn Forche and Louise Gluck–even Erica Jong, in high school, under the covers, secretly.

Once you start only reading novels and poetry by women, it’s so easy never to stop, to just forget that whole fucked-up boy world exists. I heard this fucking doucher James Ellroy on NPR the other day, and it reminded me all over again why dudes like him have ruined novels by men for me–seriously!

But, as my 73-year-old BFF Selma is fond of pointing out: men these days are different. Softer. Matthew Dickman is one of them, and, rightfully, his poetry reminds me of that great lesson we’ve been letting poetry teach us forever: how amazing it is to be alive, right now, here.

This book in my hands, these words in my head.

perfectability impossibility: on the virtues of nuance and compromise (and also radical anarchistic revolution, yo) September 20, 2009

Here’s what I like:

Holding two completely diametrically opposed ideas in your hands and your heart at one time and rushing out into the world, thrusting both in front of you, living as hard as you can through both of them.

I’ve come to like, in truth, being a big giant hypocrite: I talk such talk about not compromising, drawing lines in the sand, and purity, but every second of my life, pretty much by definition, is a compromise on shifting sands of impurity.

I live in the world, therefore I fail just a little. Most of the time this doesn’t bother me. I’ve come to understand that a nuanced worldview and commitment to focusing my energies where they will be best utilized is more important than slavish attention to purity. The purity game is a fun one, most of my 20s was spent in its clutches, but in the end it’s a sad, small way to spend a life.

Striving for perfection—while simultaneously recognizing its impossibility: that’s my game these days.

These rather abstract ideas have been floating around in my head more so than usual the past few days because of this great article in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert . The always-brilliant Kolbert writes about how silly and absurd those gimmicky blogs (and the books that inevitably follow) are where someone painstakingly catalogues their vainglorious attempts at eco-friendly perfection.

Specifically, she’s talking about that No Impact Man blog (which at least the dude, Colin Beavan, admits was a stunt all along), as well as two extreme-sports 100-mile dieters (who wrote a blog, then book, chronicling their year eating food grown within 100 miles of their apartment) and that woman whose blog I actually pretty much like who resolved to do one “green life-style change every day for a year,” ranging from selling her car to not using toothpicks.

Let me say this first: there is a place for them in the world. Useless extremism can teach us something, for sure. But as a genre I’ve been irked by all this for a while now. Not only because, as Kolbert so adeptly points out, they are all 100% stunts manufactured for publicity and book deals—I believe the authors all genuinely believe in their missions despite their complicity in the capitalist system, and though this might out me as a ridiculous Pollyanna, that’s OK—but mostly because they are actually doing the environmental movement, in the long run, a disservice on two fronts.

The first problem is the problem of nuance: lack thereof. The second is that the ingrained inequities and malfunctions of our beloved late-stage capitalism really don’t allow for your giant eco-leaps to mean much to the society as a whole. Yes, admitting that kinda sorta invalidates my entire lifestyle, but it’s a good reminder to me that all my organic jeans and local produce and composting don’t give me a free pass to stay home when I should be out smashing the state like a good anarchist.

First the first: Maybe they are fun books and blogs to read for those of us who consider ourselves grassroots environmentalists, but for the culture at large, to whom they are almost exclusively aimed, I think their projects backfire. If you teach someone that eating locally involves growing and grinding your own wheat when you can’t source it near your home, no one is going to want to eat locally.

What, exactly, are these capers meant to show? Why do they irk me so? I guess it’s a certain self-righteousness (and I of course, Ms. bicycle-powered-washing-machine and whatnot, don’t like competition in that department) and…what? It’s just media-savvy lefty thoughtful people trying to draw attention to a giant problem, right?

I think it boils down to this: nuance as a methodology for long-term sustainability.

Pop culture, by definition, cannot accept nuance, so we get these wild extremes. But if we truly want long-term solutions, we need nuance. We need, for example, salt. No one wants to live without salt, and it shouldn’t be seen as a virtue when you decide you’re going to go for a year without salt. Or, for that matter, cumin and coriander and cardamom and cloves (did you ever notice how many spices start with “C”?)—in short, the richnesses of the world. Having spices literally broadens our horizons and enriches our lives. There are smart ways to harvest and transport that which cannot immediately be grown in your neighborhood, just as there are smart ways to reduce your environmental footprint without reducing your life to such a tiny circle that one day you find yourself, as No Impact Man and his family did, to climbing fifty-four flights of stairs a day and eating endless amounts of, as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it, “cabbage slaw in the dark.”

Perhaps no one looks at these books and thinks, as I fear they do, “It’s too hard, I won’t even start.” Maybe your standard American housewife will buy Sleeping Naked is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car, and Found Love in 366 Days and will be inspired to walk to work more or turn down her thermostat, or something. Perhaps these quirky personal stories, a bit of medicine with a good deal of sugar thrown in, are what we need to turn our brain-dead populace into something closer to thinking, consciously consuming upright citizens. I sort of doubt it, but who knows.

On to my second point.

As Kolbert brilliantly points out (she can’t do anything non-brilliantly, have you noticed?) in the sort of commentary I’d expect to find in The Nation, not The New Yorker*, the primary problems are structural, not personal, and therefore personal solutions aren’t always (or, let’s be honest, ever) the best solutions (Ms. the-personal-is-political, are you listening?).

She puts it so much better than I ever could that I’ll just do a little copy and paste action:

So committed is Beavan to his claim of zero impact that he can’t—or won’t—see the deforestation for the trees. He worries a great deal about the environmental consequences of Michelle’s tampon use and the shrink-wrap around a block of cheese. But when it comes to his building’s heating system, which is apparently so wasteful that people are opening windows in the middle of winter, he just throws up his hands.

A more honest title for Beavan’s book would have been “Low Impact Man,” and a truly honest title would have been “Not Quite So High Impact Man.” Even during the year that Beavan spent drinking out of a Mason jar, more than two billion people were, quite inadvertently, living lives of lower impact than his. Most of them were struggling to get by in the slums of Delhi or Rio or scratching out a living in rural Africa or South America. A few were sleeping in cardboard boxes on the street not far from Beavan’s Fifth Avenue apartment.
What makes Beavan’s experiment noteworthy is that it is just that—a voluntary exercise conducted for a limited time only by a middle-class family. Beavan justifies writing about it on the ground that it will inspire others to examine their wasteful ways. On the last page, he observes:

Throughout this book I’ve tried to show how saving the world is up to me. I’ve tried hard not to lecture. Yes, it’s up to me. But after living for a year without toilet paper, I’ve earned the right to say one thing: It’s also up to you.
So, what are you going to do?

If wiping were the issue, this would be a reasonable place to end. But, sadly—or perhaps happily—it isn’t. The real work of “saving the world” goes way beyond the sorts of action that “No Impact Man” is all about.
What’s required is perhaps a sequel. In one chapter, Beavan could take the elevator to visit other families in his apartment building. He could talk to them about how they all need to work together to install a more efficient heating system. In another, he could ride the subway to Penn Station and then get on a train to Albany. Once there, he could lobby state lawmakers for better mass transit. In a third chapter, Beavan could devote his blog to pushing for a carbon tax. Here’s a possible title for the book: “Impact Man.”

Totally, totally, totally.

But! This is not to say, I don’t think, that personal solutions are no solutions at all. I think the trick is a mix of personal responsibility (cutting consumption, buying mindfully, etc) and massive societal structural overhaul. Sadly, I don’t think any of these books and blogs contributes all that much to either.

*The blow job to Bloomberg in the issue before reminded me what I was reading though, don’t worry.

of pronunciation and peelers September 19, 2009

“Don’t fuck with my French, yo!”

I feel the need to publicly shame someone. How wonderful to have an internet medium seemingly designed expressly for this purpose!

So, the other day a friend and I went to a certain kitchen supply store in a certain hamlet located between Rosendale and Marbletown, New York (fun fact: said hamlet is “94.90% white,” as of the 2000 census. I’d venture a guess that 92.5 of those whities are former residents of the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan, and this faggy flavor is what prevents the precious, richie town [excuse me, hamlet] from falling over the cliff into insufferability, in my mind.) My friend is in the market for a quality insulated travel mug, and I just like lusting after kitchen supplies and adjusting my mental wish list.

So there we were.

I asked the ultra-snooty store owner if he had a “chinoise.” His response: “You mean a chinois? I only order those around the holidays, I order two and they go fast. Do you want me to order one for you?”

No, I do not.

Because first of all the store, while pretty and whatnot, is aimed at city folk outfitting their zillion dollar upstate kitchens and I’m a damn commercial chef just trying to make my damn way in this hard cold world and really I was just browsing anyway, but also: you corrected my pronunciation, dude? For reals?

Two things:

1) How incredibly rude!! OK, if one of my clients asks me what is in a see-tan or keen-o-a, or tem-peh dish, I say “Sure, it has say-tan, and keen-wa, and tem-pay, and carrots and whatnot and it’s good and blah blah”—I just pronounce the words right, but I don’t correct them—argh! The snobbery! Who does that?*

2) The worst part is, of course, is that I am such a giant snob (also parce que I will be paying off my French minor for the next vingt ans) I have to point out here to the world that I was TOTES RIGHT!

I. Feel. So. Much. Better.

Well, just one more thing. I was also nosing around for a new peeler (after looking online for days and days for peeler blades that I could easily pop into my old peeler–why does this not exist? Have no peeler manufacturers ever had a conversation with any razor manufacturers? Could I somehow facilitate this talk?). Mr. Snob pointed me to two: a $15 monstrosity of clumsy design and heaviness, and the dreaded ceramic peeler.

I’m beginning to think I am the only person in the world who literally cannot make a ceramic peeler work. I’ve used two, and both were shamefully horrid. But other people seem to like them, so live and let live, I guess.

On the far other end of the spectrum, happily, is the Swiss Pro. If you’re looking for a dirt-cheap peeler that will never let you down, allow me to introduce you to Ms. Swiss Pro. She’s on a stamp in Switzerland, ok? That’s really all you need to know.

Of course, because no one sells them locally, I was recently forced to eBay my way to a fresh supply. See—I try to shop locally first, I swear.

Even when my intelligence is called into question.

Hrumph.

*Actually, this ties into a problem I sometimes run into: people who chronically pronounce my name wrong. I try to correct people right away, but sometimes it gets away from me and months go by and I have to do what I had to do last week and set up a giant sting operation where I get any pals hanging around to yell out my name in front of the mispronouncer. It worked last week flawlessly, can you believe it? All fixed up. No awkwardness, no annoyances. Just a quick “HEY LAGUSTA!” yell from across the room.

that thing they say about time: it’s true, you know September 10, 2009

Here we go again, a little less achy this time—please.