I love when a periodical gets a letter pointing how a previously published letter was factually and blatantly wrong. The Post gets a few of these every week and print them on the Free for All page of the Saturday op-eds.
PC World has a great one in their most recent issue. Online, they printed it at the bottom of this page. Realizing I also read the letters department every month, I had to give it respect.
Young Kevin Pratt angered his classmates. And their parents. And most everyone who goes to his community pool, where even the Chicago Tribune showed up to learn just how much people disliked young Kevin. How did the boy manage all this? He stuck up for the goldfish.
Dudes, I thought Steven the Dell Dude was back. I was watching TV the other day, and there was a Best Buy with this kid staring up at their plasma screens. I thought, "Dude, the Dell Dude is back!" But upon further review, dudes, it was not allegedly pot possessing Ben Curtis. It was instead Adam the Dell Intern, AKA the tall white dude, AKA Ben Ziff.
Googling Ziff just now was kind of fun. According to various sources, he has held guest roles on ER and a few other shows. Also, according to IMDB, he was the lead guitarist in hard rock band Blackout punk rock band Threat to Conformity.
Is Ziff annoying? AmIAnnoying.com wants know.
And where has Ben Curtis been, you ask? Dude, yesterday he took part in a reading of The Joy of Gay Sex at New York's Manhattan Theatre Club.
The New Yorker stack continues to fall.
Jan. 12, 2004
"Demon Baby" receives description in the front of the book. "The Clubbed Thumb theatre company presents a new play by Erin Courtney about a homesick American wife in London who acquires a diabolical imaginary friend while her husband is at work."
"High Heels and Red Noses" immediately follows. "The neo-vaudvillian Bindlestiff Family Cirkus presents a new show in which the action begins after a clown named Kinko discovers a high-heeled show in the trash."
Inside, Ian Frazier writes "Bags in Trees: A Retrospective," about he and his friends make a hobby of using long poles to get plastic bags and other trash out of trees. The article is unfortunately not online.
I also like the back page cartoon.
April 5, 2004
On page 34, I've bent the upper corner for one of two reasons. After reading the issue a few weeks ago, I have no idea which of the two reasons was the actual one.
The first possibility is a passage from the article flowing through the page. (Again, not online.) Jake Halpern is writing about the Trackboyz, hip-hop producers hopeful of being the St. Louis answer to the Neptunes. They are also mentors to Tipsy's J-Kwon. Halpern visits them "in a two-story house in an upper-middle-class suburb of St. Louis called Hazelwood."
One-half of the Trackboyz, Mark (Tarboy) Williams meets him at the door. Halpern writes, "He offered me a complicated five- or six-part handshake, which I fumbled my way through, then escorted me around the first floor, which was lined with tanks including reptiles (including two monitor lizards and two well-fed pythons) and down to a studio in the basement."
The other possible reason I bent the corner is because of the page's inset poem, "Daisies" by Mary Oliver. The poem is reproduced online here.
Notably, Burkhard Bilger writes "The Height Gap: Why Europeans are getting taller and taller — and Americans aren't." Read at length.
My favorite cartoon of the issue comes near the back, my favorite not least of all because the man is wooing his date in his socks. Which is to say — or to stop those thinking of pajamas jokes like the one I'm realizing right now — the man is in his socks wooing his date. Forget it; see the cartoon.
Aug. 2, 2004
Skipping to the recent end of the stack, either the issue fails to delight or I'm just too sleepy to enjoy it.
Page 62 is a good one. In an Ian Parker article about a real estate tycoon giving away $45 million and then one of his kidneys, the man talks about the effect on his children. "In the schoolyard, a child had approached one of his sons, saying, 'Why don't you just donate me that cheese stick?'"
The best longer reading of the issue comes at the beginning of Hendrik Hertzberg's review of Bill Clinton's autobiography. Politics aside, the first segment (down to the second big letter) rolls downhill wonderfully.
This blog crossed the 40,000 hit mark on Friday. Belatedly, thank you for reading.
Slate digs up Julia Child's four-day diary, chronicling for the site a press tour of hers in 2000. She's generally concerned with the day's schedule, but bits of her wisdom and style pop up in unexpected spots.
A few old words about Child that are disappearing instead of reappearing this week come in the "about me" page of the Amateur Gourmet. One of my favorite bloggers, the foodie is taking up residence in New York, so his new material replaces his Atlanta description. But Google's cache preserves the beautiful tip of the hat:
The Amateur Gourmet is a hard-working single mother who, when not fighting addiction, takes on the guise of a third year male law student in Atlanta, GA. Recently smitten with all things culinary, the Amateur Gourmet would rather watch Martha Stewart than Monday Night Football because Monday Night Football is too tame. Witty, vibrant, and choc full of caustic charm, the Amateur Gourmet is America's answer to Julia Child. What's that you say? Julia Child is American? NOT IN MY BOOK SHE ISN'T. MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING? MORE LIKE MASTERING THE ART OF OSAMA-LOVING COOKING.
Unrelated to Julia Child directly, in the Post Sunday Source this week, there's a brief about a grilled cheese contest. Chemical company Dupont (maker of Telfon) is sponsoring the "Greatest Grilled Cheese Sandwich in America Contest." First prize is $10,000 and a wine and cheese tour in Sonoma, Calif. Details are available on the contest's Web site. I plan to enter my recipe for the accomplishment of a grilled cheese sandwich.
The grilled cheese sandwich is not fancy. The grilled cheese sandwich is "down home." I actually found myself using that phrase recently. Seriously. "Down home." I have no trouble being one with my hometown's sleepy Southern-ness, but this usage seems a step further along the trail. We'll see if it sticks.
Anyway, speaking of down home, Timothy Davis writes for eGullet this summer about the authenticity of Southern food and writing. The South has learned a Sawyer-esque lesson, he says:
What we discovered is this: We can fleece these Yanks! Pop a paint pen in that old gas station attendant's hands. Folk art! You grew up in a trailer? Write a memoir! You make a pretty decent pork shoulder, and people call you Mama? Open a cafe! (Just make sure the facade is appropriately "weathered" and you offer sweet tea. Always sweet tea.)
Davis goes on to admit he has no trouble working within this system. For evidence, his Web site offers his Spring 2003 Gastronomica piece, "Pig Under Glass," and a few other Southern-oriented food pieces. Davis gives the Yankees the comparisons they need: "Ever seen the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard? The inside of Taylor Grocery was something like that show's Boar's Nest, the little establishment that would feature musical performances from whoever Boss Hogg and Co. managed to snag in their speed traps."
eGullet, returning to topic, has as much Julia Child material as one would expect. The highlight for me is the site's interview with her. As we hear in all the obituaries how Child's love of the French coincided in the early 1960s with a national pro-French spirit, the eGullet piece brings us what Child thought of the recent anti-French spirit in the States. "I think they're silly," she says. "They were pouring great Bordeaux wines out in the street. Just ridiculous."
Splendid magazine reviews my friend Beau's new album in their latest round-up. Could a Pitchfork review be far off? Writes the Splendid critic:
The 22nd is not for everyone, or even 99 out of a hundred people, but it is an absolutely essential kind of work. While some musicians refine the language and others broaden its lexicon, Beau Finley actively avoids any direct dialogue between artist and listener. He intentionally arranges his music in a realm outside the established boundaries of pop, art-rock, and even atmospheric rock. The results are not overwhelming, not gorgeous, not depressing, and not happy. They are aggressively abstract art.
In addition to his solo work, Beau also plays in the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Sexy Two, writes a blog and attends Georgetown University Law School. Hoya saxa? Beau Finley, that's what.
The other day, after Julia Child died, a boomer I'll leave anonymous couldn't believe the 20-somethings in the room knew who Child was. I couldn't believe he couldn't believe it. Our access points to the cook had clearly been different. He knew her image directly; we knew the mirrors.
We wouldn't have read her books, watched her shows or had the slightly knowledge on the French's influence in our lunchboxes (metal or plastic). But Child would have shown up sometime after the Star-Spangled Banner on our local PBS affilate and before the end of the day's watching — a Big Bird-sized woman with Mr. Rogers' manners.
The voice must have made an impression as well. Of course it must have. A couple decades later, it still only takes preening eyebrows and the voice to pick up Cliff Huxtable's Child on Cosby's early Thanksgiving episode. TV Tome supplies the exact wording:
Cliff: "First, you slice ever so gently along the grain, following the contour of the bird."
Theo: "Dad, why are you talking like that?"
Cliff: "I have no idea; it's just that it makes me feel more secure when I'm in the kitchen."
And Theo gets to the voice later, teen squeakiness and all. On the Web, Whitney notes the moment in her Theo-love column, and a son remembers doing the voices with his late father. My inner monologue goes there too, anytime I've got to cook anything more complex than boiling water.
Not that boiling water is easy. I'm not proud of my reaction to the first time a pot of mine bubbled over. I'm no Julia Child. But in one of her books, she does describe the water boiling process — from tepid to shiver to rolling — so I don't feel too misplaced with my concern. Or more existentially, like the French, I don't feel too misplaced in my kitchen.
Ryan Towell of Weatherbug is hunkered down in a Ft. Myers, Fla., emergency operations center with a laptop and a broadband connection. With the building already on backup power and experiencing 78 mph gusts, Towell continues to post to his blog right now. It's absolutely worth visiting and reloading throughout this afternoon.
If I was into photos, I would buy one: "Unique Floating Photo Frame holds four photographs in mid-air, seemingly like magic. The photo cube section works by pitting a powerful magnet against a strong, monofilament cable."
