“Isn’t beer the holy libation of sincerity? The potion that dispels all hypocrisy, any charade of fine manners? The drink that does nothing worse than incite its fans to urinate in all innocence, to gain weight in all frankness?”
—-Milan Kundera
Deep Ellum, Texas
The scary thing is, looking at this list, how many of them I have tried. So little time, so many beers.
“One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver—not aloud, but to himself—that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at.”
― Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks of a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.
—-Honore de Balzac
From my blog (I called it an “Online Journal” then), The Daily Epiphany, Saturday, February 16, 2002
I guess most people want somebody to cook some special meal for their birthday. What I wanted, though, was to cook my own.
Some close friends of ours have started their own catering business. They have leased a storefront and outfitted it with commercial cooking equipment – big ovens and a huge gas stove, giant refrigerator and freezers, and massive stainless steel tables for food organization and preparation. They gave me a key and I went down there the other week to set up their computer and I fell in love with the place. I guess my favorite thing is the commercial gas range – it looks like what the chefs on all the cooking shows use – an acre of massive black iron pan supports with tiny blue pilot lights sprinkling the area. Turn a heavy steel knob and a get-engine rush of gas throws out some serious heat. It’s something you can actually cook on – not like the wimpy weak glowing electric coils in my home kitchen.
When they called and asked what I wanted for my birthday dinner I replied that I wanted to cook in their commercial kitchen. They said sure so I prepared a menu and went down to the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market to buy my supplies (I won’t shop at Albertson’s any more, even though it’s closer to my house, in protest of their new 1984 Big Brother Card).
I drove down to the place a couple hours early, put a CD in the boom box and started cooking. I made onions cut in half and hollowed out, wrapped with a strip of bacon and stuffed with wilted spinach and a dollop of feta cheese on top. I marinated some sliced fresh mozzarella in sour cream and spices, then melted this over some crusty bread with a slice of tomato and an orange sprinkle of some powdered chile de arbol. For my main course I put chicken breasts, mushrooms, potatoes, white wine, and a fistful of chopped fresh herbs into bags made of carefully folded heavy foil (the basic recipe came from TV, from the Naked Chef) and baked the mess. Candy made a chocolate cake and I added a baby spinach salad.
We had six folks for diner and a sitter for everybody’s kids (we knew there wouldn’t be anything to keep the little ones occupied at the catering place). There weren’t any good places to sit, but there was plenty of wine, so that didn’t matter.
I think the food came out fine (the one thing I didn’t have was a good toaster or a salamander so the bread turned out a soggy – the stuffed onions were too tough, though the stuffing was good), especially the chicken. The foil bag is a great technique to learn. I can imagine baking stuff at home and taking it to a picnic. The foil puffs up like a Jiffy Pop and it’s great when you pierce the package and all that fragrant steam puffs out. Easy clean-up, too.
And now, a piece of flash fiction for today:
from Flash Fiction Online
“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”― Rainer Maria Rilke
Just a couple days ago I watched a movie and wrote a blog entry about a Nazi WWII movie. It’s just a coincidence that I watched another one so soon – Jojo Rabbit was recommended by a website listing underrated, quirky movies. It was on the internet, so it has to be true.
Jojo Rabbit was made by Taika Waititi – who wisely chose to spend some of his Thor Ragnarok money on an odd film that would never have been financed otherwise.
It’s a comedy/drama about a young boy, an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth in the waning days of the second world war. The boy has trouble fitting in, so he develops an imaginary playmate – Adolph Hitler himself, played as a dim-witted goofball by Taika Waititi himself.
Here’s an early scene that sets the tone and moves the plot forward:
The movie has a real Wes Anderson feel to it – which is fun. There is a lot of star power here and a lot of talent behind the camera – which is fun.
Of course things take a dark turn. Even a friendly, goofy Gestapo is terribly deadly. The boy starts to part from his imaginary best friend (HItler) when he is inspired and confused by a discovery in his attic (no spoilers here – other reviews of this film have too many). There is tragedy and redemption….
And a pretty damn enjoyable underrated, quirky movie.
“The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.”
― Michel Houellebecq
Craig was going to eat fruit for lunch today. He bought it last night, midnight, on a milk run to the grocery store. They needed milk for breakfast for the kids (they get pissed off if there is no milk) and he realized they were out when he was ready for bed. Therefore, midnight milk run, not an unusual thing. Big city equals 24hr grocery stores.
Today, though, the fruit was bad. Craig opened the plastic tub up at his desk and was met with a nasty slimy smell.
He was hungry, so despite good intentions, it was going to be fast food. There was a long line, a lot of high school kids on their lunch hour already in the seats. One was goofing off so much he fell out of his chair, ice drink flew all over.
He tried to watch people sitting at the other tables. Two women nearby. One entire corner of their table was taken up by a pile of black electronic devices. Pagers, Cell Phones. While they ate they were hooked in, wired up.
Two suited and tied middle aged middle manager types were next to them. One faced Craig and he could understand the manager when he spoke. His partner’s voice was an unintelligible mumble.
“The forklifts, we’re selling ’em faster than we get them in.”
“mumble mumble mumble”
“First things first, we should fix the spare IBM.”
“mumble mumble mumble”
“But they didn’t have a backlog”
“mumble mumble mumble”
On around, the next table, a cute woman sat, her lunch eaten, reading a paperback. He stared at her as long as he though was appropriate and nobody noticed.
And that’s about it. He ate, and left, to drive across the street to a bookstore. His son had been checking these books out from the School Library; How to Draw 50 Famous Cartoon Characters, How to Draw 50 Dinosaurs, How to Draw 50 Animals . He sits for hours, typing paper spread across the coffee table in the living room, drawing. Sometimes he cheats and traces.
Craig wanted to buy him one of these books today, maybe buy one every week or so, that way he will have some that he doesn’t have to return, that he won’t worry about tearing or getting some crayon in.
And that’s about it. That’s his time off for the day.
“I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to ‘make a new start’ or to be ‘born again’: Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a ‘clean’ sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov’s microcosmic miniature story ‘Signs and Symbols,’ which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir
I am not sure what reminded me of the historical WWII movie (not a film, really, it was made for TV) Conspiracy – but I did a search and found it streaming on HBO Max. I had seen a good bit of the short (hour-and-a-half) work before. I had searched it out because I had seen a documentary on and was interested in the life and death of the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich – a particular hideous man assassinated by a team sent by the Czech government in exile.
So I re-watched it and it was crackerjack. It is the story of the 1942 Wannsee conference, set at a posh estate outside of Berlin. A group of top Nazis meet and develop the monstrous plan to settle the “Jewish Question.” It is based on the only surviving transcript of the meeting and is an awful, yet illuminating record of the thoughts of the butchers involved.
What first struck me was the illustration of Hannah Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil. Despite the apocalyptic subject being discussed, the men are obsessed with jockeying for power, style, and the food being served. It is truly a slice of genocidal bureaucracy.
I watched it with the subtitles on so I could follow the exact language. The way the couched the subjects, the way they pounded on the table, the way they insisted what they were doing was not only legal, but the only moral imperative – was chilling. Absolute, pure evil was disguised and couched in the language of duty. Think about this the next time you watch a Zoom meeting where a disastrous or immoral conclusion is arrived at without anyone talking about what is really going on.
Oh, now I remember what reminded me of this movie…. The algorithm presented me with a YouTube video showing someone that had a tiny, bit part (a radio operator) in the film. I always enjoy spotting a future star with a background part in a film.
I guess it’s inevitable that Loki would be present at the conception of the Holocaust.
I have been avidly following the saga of the young pair of Bald Eagles at White Rock Lake here at Dallas. A local school has a streaming webcam of their new nest.
Coastal metro areas continue to dominate the market for knowledge and creative workers. But other cities in the middle of the country are starting to gain ground.
Stress can feel like a baseline condition for many of us – especially during a pandemic. But there are ways to help alleviate the very worst of it, whether through support, sleep or radical self-care
Some powders and drinks boast all of the necessary nutrients a body needs — no grocery trips required. But it isn’t clear how drinking our meals might affect our health.
There is no doubt that resilience is a useful and highly-adaptive trait, especially in the face of traumatic events. However, it can be taken too far. For example, too much resilience could make people overly tolerant of adversity. At work, this can translate into putting up with boring or demoralizing jobs — and particularly bad bosses — for longer than needed. In addition, too much resilience can get in the way of leadership effectiveness and, by extension, team and organizational effectiveness. Multiple studies suggest that bold leaders are unaware of their limitations and overestimate their leadership capabilities and current performance, making them rigidly and delusionally resilient and closed off to information that could be imperative in fixing — or at least improving — behavioral weaknesses. While it may be reassuring for teams, organizations, and countries to select leaders on the basis of their resilience — who doesn’t want to be protected by a tough and strong leader? — such leaders are not necessarily always good for the group as a whole.
Today, on Elizabeth Hardwick’s birthday, the best thing to do is to pick up a copy of Sleepless Nights, or perhaps her Collected Essays, and find a quiet corner in which to read them. This may, however, leave you wondering how such literary magic is possible, and maybe even wishing you had a small compilation of Hardwick’s comments about the art and the making of it.
Micromanipulation is a subtle form of emotional abuse that narcissists use in their closest relationships to regain a sense of control: here’s how to recognise its damaging effects.
George: “I have a sixth sense.”
Jerry: “Cheapness is not a sense.”
—-Seinfeld
Things are tough right now – I don’t have the time or energy for deep creativity. I thought that I’d communicate one thing I have learned over the last couple decades – Everything is contained in Seinfeld. There is wisdom if you look.
As evidence – this:
“The price of wisdom and integrity is despair”
I came across the quote: “The price of wisdom and integrity is despair” in the above Youtube video tonight and it resonated to me. I’m feeling a lot of despair right now but not much wisdom and integrity.
Will work on unpacking it – but I also need to get some sleep.
Be strong in body, clean in mind, lofty in ideals.
—-James Naismith
Bill Chance 