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.

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.

Monday Miscellany! September 29, 2009

If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

–Antoine de Saint-Exupery

How beautiful is that?

So, with that beginning, here we go:

My bike expert BFF Randy has himself a fascinating and thoughtful brand new biking blog!

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If you weren’t lucky enough to go to Mergefest XX, you can check out some lovely videos of most of the bands (mixed by my sweetheart) here!

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This sweetie, Leanne, left a comment here a while back, but in case you didn’t catch the link to her site I wanted to point it out: high-fashion gorgeous VEGAN COATS, PEOPLE!!!!! Are you dying? I am dying! I have a constant coat issue (it’s related to the constant winter shoe issue, which, by the way, is as of yet unresolved, even one year later) and know that someday I am going to have to fork over a lot of money just to have a coat I truly love (I have an idea this will somehow magically make me like winter). Sadly for my bank account but happily for everything else, I might have found The One. (On the other hand, my heart also beats wildly when it looks at this one—what say you?)

Also I know a boy who is getting this shirt for Hanukkah:

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A cute review of the bonbons here (ignore the vegan ridiculousness….)…

And I have a few more bits of interest, but am too tired from a long week of work (and fun!) to get into them—more soon!

Monday Miscellany: cute boyfriend* Tuesday edition September 15, 2009

Can I just tell you this insanely cute thing first? A sweet sweet blogreader spotted Jacob in Denver! She recognized him from pictures on this here blog and, knowing his touring lifestyle + knowing that there was a big music festival in her town the day before + seeing as they were both in a veggie restaurant, she put 1 and 1 and 1 together and it all equaled Jacob and I’m just tickled by the whole thing. Jacob reports that he had a frisson of recognition too but didn’t realize it until later when I told him the story and he asked if she was the one who put up pictures on Facebook of her bonbon order. Yes and yes! Small worlds and lovely people!

Someone get that boy a transfat-laden vegan cupcake!

Speaking of the exact opposite, I am hilariously slandered by one of the meanest people in our town on this long long comments thread. I’ve got a lot to say about the whole thing, but I’m going to let it go and focus on more productive tasks. Like:

Everyone totally agrees with me about Julie & Julia (NSFV [Not Safe for Vegans] alert: there is a nasty picture of a dead chicken on that page)! Wow, I’m never so spot-on with the culture at large. I still haven’t seen the movie, though…partially because of the NSFV aspect I know is on display, partially because I am so utterly uninterested in the Julie story.

Also at Gourmet.com (and thanks to my amazing editor Brittany for pointing out the janky link), this interview with this dude who says that cooking food is what makes us human, which I have also always believed, which annoys crazy raw people, which is something I like to do, because: they are crazy.

Jacob thinks they stole the idea from me, but I am unconcerned about such stuff, and am super excited that the Feministing crew are doing some AMAZING blogging about Mad Men! Check it!

Also at Feministing, this thoughtful piece on nudity. Ah, I love that site…and being naked.

This American Life from two weeks ago is about…..my Thruway exit! How bizarre…and interesting! New Paltz is even mentioned!

Speaking of podcasts, my bestest one, TBTL, was canceled last week from their Seattle radio station and is now making a go as a podcast: check it out & keep them in business so I can continue to listen to their lightly hipstery, non-political, pop-culturey, non-annoying voices three hours a day while cooking! (I loves me my Amy Goodman and NPR podcasts, but I need TBTL because it doesn’t make me angry like political podcasts do, which is a good thing when you’re cooking.)

Um…I’m playing hooky from tidying up the “garden” (read: weedland), so that’s it for now, sweethearts!

*Yeah, you know we’re not boyfriend and girlfriend, but “cute partner edition” doesn’t sound as good.

Monday Miscellany! August 24, 2009

via TBTL via HuffPo, via I can’t stop laughing at this picture, what is wrong with me?

Oh Thom! Click here and read the “for more information, click here” and fall in love with Thom Yorke for the twenty millionth time since you were 15. (My crush on Thom Yorke is a teenager, how can that be?)

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Everyone and their uncle has sent me this link, and yeah, it’s just as horrid as we’ve come to expect from PETA. (Thanks to everyone and their uncle).

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Hudson Valley Vegan blog, what up what up! Vegans in the HV!!

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Buy a/r-friendly wine!

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I so loathe all the little “libertarian” kiddos in my college town who love pot and Ron Paul and are otherwise totes uninformed about true libertarianism–read this and weep, kids: libertarian is MY term! Stop stealing it! (Thanks to Deric for the link)

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The Hudson Valley Seed Library, run by adorable loves of mine Ken & Doug, made these cute Blight Bites t-shirts!

Monday Miscellany! August 4, 2009

You know what’s crazy?? This is not my photo, but I own a pretty much identical smock! It likes to hang on a clothesline too!

Dudes!!! The blog seems to have become a link dump lately, and for that I most heartily apologize. Regular screaming original programming returning soon—promise!

It’s actually really annoying when bloggers apologize for not blogging, isn’t it? It’s sort of a huge peeve of mine—who cares if you fucking blog or not??—so I’m sorry to do it now. I’m in that post-vacation work/housework/paperwork tornado, and while doing all my chores I’ve been thinking of lots to get angry about/recipes to post/Mad Men thoughts, so I guess I’m apologizing to myself for not getting it together to organize my thoughts on anything.

So whatevs, let’s get to it:

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Bitch Magazine on PETA, then Carol Adams on PETA (she, like I, must get so tired of rehashing this over and over and over and over and over. Can we just say it once and for all and be done? PETA IS FUCKED. Done!)

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All my BFF farmers (Kira! Billiam! Polly & Jay!) are interviewed in this heartbreaking NYT piece on how big box stores have ruined local organic tomatoes and we will have no tomatoes this year. Veronique and I usually turn 60 lbs of tomatoes into a few gallons of roasted tomato sauce every week that I freeze and use throughout the year. My goal for this year was going to be 800 lbs (100 lbs a week for 8 weeks, it sounds manageable, doesn’t it?), because I constantly run out of tomatoes by March or so. My heart is broken 20,000 times over, and I am steeling myself to pay in gold for what little bit of nightshade love I can get. Argh.  (Thanks for all the alerts to this article!)

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Amanda at Pandagon has a great analysis of women and porn, particularly this:

I hate to trot out the term “objectification”, because people really misunderstand what it means, including a lot of feminists who are really fond of it.  It doesn’t mean being looked at with lust.  It means that your subjective reality is dismissed in pursuit of upholding someone else’s, reducing you to an object.

Yeah, I find people constantly are confused by the difference between “we’re making out, please look at me lustfully,” and “you are nothing but a thing to be used for male gazey pleasure.” What a world of difference there is between those two, no? The whole article is super rad really, go read it!

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OK, and: did any of you read the New Yorker Nora Ephron profile? It was written by the lovely Ariel Levy, and I was so excited that she said just exactly what I feel about the Julie and Julia book (and now movie): it sorta stinks. I listened to the audio book of the book, and I will go see the movie because (veganosity not withstanding) I am madly in love with Julia Child, but man oh man I found that Julie lady to be, in a word, INSUFFERABLE. I’m disheartened that it seems the movie is a faithful representation of the book—why not a good old fashioned Julia Child bio-pic? Her life had enough drama and intrigue in it to fill up days! Why put in boring claptrap about some blah blah mall-clothes beige office drone?

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And this is getting long, but: WOW. This dude is doing some amazing chocolate….stuff. I found out about him through people making fun of me, and now I’m totally obsessed with his work. Fucking amazing, yo.

Je vous adore,

Lagusta

Monday Miscellany: vacation edition! July 27, 2009

Oh, speaking of time off: if you’re going to be at the M. Ward show in Athens, Georgia today or Nashville tomorrow, come by the merch table and say hello to yours truly, whose sweetheart has put her to work selling swag!

Girlfriend vacations are the best. Oh, I miss you two already so much!

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Hey, the owner of the Rosendale Café (nope! See below!) has a rad blog all about Rosendale!

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You’ve probably already heard about this stupidity, but in case not: Barneys’ windows decorated with the oh-so-edgy “Drop Dead Gorgeous” theme, complete with fake blood and mannequins in contorted poses.

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My friend-of-two-friends Amelia (two otherwise unrelated pals who are both pals with Amelia: don’t you love it when that happens?) is having a solo show in Seattle, how freaking rad does it look? “Hollywood Depicted in Needlepoint and Lace”–I don’t even quite know what that means, but it’s just my style, I can tell.

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Thanks, Obama! (thanks, for real, to Ilene for the tip)

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Monthly vegan cooking competition in Chelsea NYC! (thanks Nelson!)

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OK, I’m way too snotty to have an iPhone app telling me what’s vegan at horrid trash chain restaurants (though I ate trash hash browns at Waffle House the other day and was happy I didn’t know where on the griddle they were cooked….I was in Virginia, can you blame me? They were great!), but if you travel in non-vegan friendly places it might be useful—and it has a list of vegan wines & beers!

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And an inspiring ending:

Why I adore my mentor Selma: she is gathering the archives of Bloodroot to be archived at Yale, and had this to say about it:

“We are very absorbed in the stuff with Yale, gathering all these memories, letters, writings, photos.  Very strange. I find it somewhat depressing.  Carolanne [her partner] thinks  it is about mortality; I think it feels like a bad thing to spend so much effort on the past, when what I require is new creation for the present and future…”

Selma’s about 73 years old. Every day I’m heartened to know someone who is so stimulated by new discoveries and projects.

Monday Miscellany July 20, 2009

The weirdness of Google Alerts never fails to amaze me—what exactly is this thing that shares my name? I can’t figure it out.

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I’m a huge “person is political” sort of person, but Derrick Jensen makes some 100% spot-on points in this article all about the flawed idea that if we all just take shorter showers and compost or whatever we’re actually doing something to combat the massive, systematic hideosities inherent in our current way of living on every level. While I agree with him absolutely and was pretty much blinded by the dazzling brilliance of the piece, nothing says that you can’t work to change society from the root up and compost, right?

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Silk sucks! I think I’m the only vegan in the world who never ever uses soymilk (I don’t eat cereal, and I don’t like the taste in baking), so when all my pals suddenly started talking about how Silk (which everyone seems to agree is the best soymilk on the market) was mysteriously not organic one day I didn’t really listen—but what a mess it’s become, argh.

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I’ve got a recipe up (and am called a cutie pie) over at Girlie Girl Army–check it! I know, I know, they are so….femmy! But, as I said in a comment when Kevin expressed surprise at seeing it, “I thought about it thusly: if I don’t like that they embrace, say, Skinny Bitch, what better way for them to change than by embracing, say, me? I want all those girlie girls to buy feminist chocolates, yes I do!” And now I’m quoting myself from a blog post two posts down from this post.

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That’s all for this week, darlings—I’m taking off on a little vacation tomorrow. Weirdly, I anticipate beaucoup de blogging, as it’s a visiting-Jacob vacation, which means time to screw around on the internet while he works. Fun!

Monday Miscellany: serious is the random July 12, 2009

Rasta resto in B-more!

David Byrne’s blog is everything a blog should be: smart and informed and stylish and personal. I don’t know exactly that our interests overlap so much, but I’m still really liking it, and how nice is that?

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I’m always curious about what everyone is doing with their pubes, aren’t you? Of course. So you’ll be as interested as I was to read this Feministing thread all about this very topic. I don’t understand how people can spend all this time shaving and waxing and shit—who has the time?

AND! You know how I’m shaving my legs these days? WTF, leg hair—can we talk? Why do you reappear in mere minutes after shaving? I know it’s weird that I’m only starting to shave my legs at age 31, but I really thought I wouldn’t have to shave, like, every day. Between constant stubble and that I refuse to shave above my knee, my legs are pretty ridiculous looking still, which hasn’t stopped everyone in my life from being stunned/amazed that I’m shaving at all.

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Heirloom bean blog! Super fascinating.

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HOLY FUCKING SHIT. Wow wow wow wow wow wow puke puke wow wow. (via TBTL!)

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Want to hear the cutest thing my moms has ever said?
“When I was younger I tried to suppress my optimistic nature, because I wanted to be an existentialist. But now I don’t try anymore.” Aww—how adorable is it to have a mom who wanted to be an existentialist when she was a kid?

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Another Feministing find, isn’t this quote beautiful?:

War is easy to abhor, but it takes a serious passion to unravel the tangles of financial manipulations and to understand the pain of sweatshop workers or displaced farmers. And maybe this is what heroism looks like nowadays: occasionally high-profile heroism in public but mostly just painstaking mastery of arcane policy, stubborn perseverance year after year for a cause, empathy with those who remain unseen, and outrage channeled into dedication.

Totes.

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I can’t wait to see this movie about women surfers. The trailer is just about the most rad thing I’ve ever seen.

Onward!