like it even needs embellishment…
I thought I knew what I would make for those little holiday gift bundles of hand-made goodies that simply must be handed out.
But now that I know of the existence of chicken fried bacon, I might have to re-think.
WARNING: Don’t be surprised by the dizziness and dull ache in your chest, it’s merely a heady mix of temptation and revulsion.
Tonight, the Lagoon Cinema is hosting a free, advance screening of Volver, Pedro Almodovar’s latest film starring Penelope Cruz. I haven’t seen it yet, so I can’t offer my personal endorsement. However, our much-trusted film guy, Peter Schilling, seems to like it. On the other hand, plenty of critics have panned the thing, as is often the case with Almodovar’s work. For example, I did overhear a remark made by another prominent local film critic. (I was eavesdropping on his conversation with Landmark Cinema’s local PR guy.) His basic assessment was a confused “What?!”
In any case, you’ll need a pass to make good on these free tickets. According to an ad in our December issue, passes are available at Puerta Azul, a restaurant in St. Paul. But we here at Rake Media Worldwide are big fans of Almodovar as well, and so we happen to have a stash at our front desk–while supplies last. You might quietly enter our suite, tell the receptionist what you’re up to, and swiftly take one away.
I have a drain where my brain ought to be. Everything that comes into my head runs straight down into my stomach, where it gets churned into mulch. The drain is a rickety thing. When I shake my head I can hear the drain rattling around in my skull. If I sleep on my side I can feel it fluttering up against my ear whenever I snore.
The drain puts me in a bit of pickle, particularly as I have urgent work to do, work that requires some careful thought.
The problem is this: I built a duck, and now I need to create some sort of pond in a hurry or I fear the duck will die. I’ve been keeping it in the kitchen sink for the time being, as I already have a red-headed mermaid living in my bathtub and she’s threatened to eat the duck if it tries to encroach on her space.
The mermaid’s been living in the tub for almost a month now, after escaping from a shampoo bottle that I dropped while taking a shower. I guess I’d have to describe the mermaid as malevolent, or at the very least ill-tempered, at the very least ornery as all get out. It’s possible, I’ve decided, that she has a bit of dragon or sea serpent in her, based on her generally aggressive manner and the amount of time she spends thrashing around in there and roaring imprecations. She creates so much steam that some days it feels like I’m living in the clouds, and I’ve grown so afraid of her that I’ve taken to pissing in the sink down in the laundry room.
I’ve thought about killing the mermaid somehow, but every time the idea starts to take shape in my head it gets gurgled straight away down the drain.
Didja know that Pumphouse Creamery has decided to stay open all year long?
Come on, I know that baby it’s cold outside, but what’s your deal with not eating ice cream in the winter?
Pumpkin ice cream, oatmeal cookie ice cream, Guiness ice cream, for godness sake, are all appropriate post-feast options.
Plus, HELLO FORTY DEGREES! Give me a break, you know you considered wearing shorts on Sunday so go. Just go.
Back in my day, you know, before tabbed websites and wikis, parents generally dreaded the long road trip. Today they seem to dread the lack of communication with their IPODed, vidiotic little brats (not recognizing their complicity in the process).
I comment about cars. I have no idea what it takes to be a parent. I do know, however, that most parents rarely consider the idea of watching a video by themselves while driving long distances. Did you realize, for example, that the navigation screen on your Toyota Prius can also become a swell DVD player for your bored spousal passenger?
Yes, you too can watch movies in the car. If you read this blog then you can already go to IMDB and search for the latest Hollywood titles to entertain yourself. I will therefore go back to an earlier mindset and consider a few picks that the late, great Pauline Kael would have approved for long car journeys. I think I will start with Japanese flim (to keep it exotic while you drive across Nebraska.)
Akira Kurosawa is often the first and last name that comes up when you fall into conversation about Japanese film. The same could be said about Sajiyt Ray (sp?) and Indian film. But why watch what everyone else watches? If you want exotic, try this film: Onibaba (available from The Criterion collection).
Onibaba was made in 1964. It is a film made after a Buddhist fable about chastity and the passions that arise over sex. If this sounds boring, then I’ll provide the Cliff notes here.
An old lady and a much younger one live in a hut in the mid-1300s. The two women attack lost and wounded samurai then kill them and make a living by selling what they steal. That’s the simple story.
The entire movie is shot in what seems to be an endless grassy marsh. The grasses sway back and forth througout the film as the story unfolds to symbolize rage, passion, confusion and so on.
Once the women have killed the samurai they throw the corpses down a large open hole in the middle of the swaying marsh. Obviously the large open hole symbolizes all kinds of things. It is an orofice, and I’ll leave it at that.
Early in the film a neighbor returns from the war. Things get interesting when the neighbor tells the two women that he saw the younger woman’s husband die in the war over a scuttle with bandits. The viewer questions why the neighbor lived to tell the story, but that’s all forgotten once the younger woman develops an interest in the man. The older woman tries to stop her but fails.
Soon the younger woman is running through the marshes every night to the hut of the neighbor to make boom boom. The older woman becomes distraught by this and soon tries to offers herself to the neighbor only to be rejected (great scene). This pisses her off so much that the the older woman resorts to scaring the younger woman into chastity. The old woman steals a mask from another samurai that she kills and taunts the younger girl on her nightime runs.
Soon all hell breaks loose. The swaying grasses, the open hole, and the stark, naked shots of the actors all combine to create wicked, palpable tension. This effect is heightened by a soundtrack that mixes the mating sounds of pigeons with Kabuki drums and urestrained saxophone (yeah, all back in 1964).
More stuff happens, but I hope you get some feel for the picture. Its not an easy flim to watch, but it is allegorical and unforgettable. Its also not that long. Which is something I cannot say for many of the flims Kurosawa was making during this period.*
* The best of which is The Bad Sleep Well. Based on an Ed McBain novel–like most of his early 60s films.
Today’s my 31st birthday. If I weren’t already set to enjoy a home-cooked dinner, as made by my fabulous boyfriend, and then drinks-upon-drinks with my closest friends, I’d probably want to spend the evening at Walker Community Church, where I’d detail and repent the very many sins I’ve committed this past year. Just Kidding! This is a Methodist Church, my friends. I don’t believe they deal in reconciliation. It also happens to be the venue for Nautilus Music-Theatre’s latest Rough Cuts concert. Tonight’s program of “Twentieth Century Degenerate Music,” as sung by Christina Baldwin, JP Fitzgibbons, and other such fine, classically-trained singers, isn’t limited to that which was deemed inappropriate by the Nazi government. (This, I believe, was the original definition of the term “degenerate music.”) The bill includes disgusting, offensive, and just irritating tunes by Marc Blitzstein, who composed the great depression-era musical, The Cradle Will Rock, as well as Bob Dylan, Randy Newman, Kurt Weill, and Frank Zappa. Showtime is 7:30 p.m.; call 651-298-9913 to make reservations yours.
It’s the rare Monday night on which a worthwhile theater production takes place. The not-often seen (not often anymore) Open Eye Figure Theatre will present its version of The Nativity Story–and the Virgin Mary promises to be a lot punchier than in Catherine Hardwicke’s playing-it-safe film version. Another thing to note about the show: although this telling of the Christmas is done from the perspective of Lucifer, rest assured that it’s quite kid-friendly. It was written and is directed by ace puppeteer and Open Eye artistic director Michael Sommers, which means it’s visually interesting. It stars such great performers at writer/performer Kevin Kling, Jeune Lune regular Sarah Agnew, and the not-often-seen-anymore, but delightful, Luverne Seifert. There’s even a backup brass band. The Holiday Pageant plays tonight and tonight only at the Pantages Theater. See the Pantages website for more information.
Them poor sick creatures going up the street at two in the morning, dancing with bells on their shoes, wailing and baring their broken teeth at the moon, just throwing them heads back and shaking them devil sticks. It’s a racket, I can’t say it isn’t, but I wouldn’t go so far as some of the others and say there’s anything terrifying about the spectacle. Doris, the woman across the street –so dramatic– tells the man from the television news, “It makes the hair stand up on my arms.”
No, them ghosts or whatever they is don’t scare me. Pitiful, is all it is. They’re all so skinny and bat-shit loony that I can’t imagine they could hurt a fly. I wish they’d keep more reasonable hours if they’re intent on making a public fuss every other week, but that’s not the nature of their business, I guess. They’re late-nighters. Always was.
They say drugs took most of them, or guns in the hands of wicked imbeciles broke-down-crazy on drugs. We see a lot of that around here. We’ve been seeing a lot of that for quite some time. First they turn themselves into poor, helpless children or animals, then savages, and then, finally, ghosts.
Up at Our Lady they do the best they can. They bury the poor creatures in the cemetery for folks without money, but trouble is the sisters can’t keep ’em buried. They crawl their way back out of them holes and go jingling’ and devil-stickin’ up and down all the old streets where they was children once upon a time.
Just last week I seen one of ’em out in my backyard, flopped on his back and giggling like a wild boy. He was making an angel in the snow.
News came at the end of this week that the Gopher football stadium was going to cost more than originally thought because it’s being built on mushy ground. Boy, if that isn’t an opportunity for a metaphor, I don’t know my Aristotle.
It’s been suggested by more than one wag that the reason the Minneapolis Library system is in such tough shape is that the city’s and state’s priorities are pretty mushy as well. Another, an unpaid advisor to a Library support group, has suggested that what the libraries need to do is drop the name “Library” and replace it with “Book Stadium”.
Think of the possibilities. As part of the U stadium finance plan, the University is charging each of its students $25 per year, whether they like football or not. (Whether or not you appreciate the irony that real students are being charged to pay for the playground of the pseudo students hired by the university to play football, you have to admire the University’s boldness in charging impoverished students 25 bucks on top of the rampant tuition increases and large increase to President Bruinink’s salary.) It’s also ironic that the Friends of the Minneapolis Library is currently running a campaign to raise funds to buy books for the Minneapolis Library that the city of Minneapolis seems unable to fund. The cost to buy a book for the whole city? $25 per book, and that includes a Friends membership.
Think of a similar program at the U. There will be about 51,000 students contributing to the stadium. That’s $1.275 million per year going to pay off the stadium–money that could be buying 51,000 books for a library, or making up the shortfall that Minneapolis needs to keep the three libraries open that are facing closing–and that’s just this year.
Thanks to some wise Hennepin County Commissioners, a tiny amount of the money from the sales tax which will fund the Twins stadium will be coming to Minneapolis and Hennepin County libraries. Here’s some more irony. The citizens of Minneapolis voted to tax themselves $125 million to build the new library and renovate the community libraries, but didn’t get to vote on whether they’d be taxed about $500 million to build the Twins stadium and, by the way, throw a small bone to the libraries.
Then there’s the Target Center, for which the city had to pony up a couple of million this year to cover operating losses so we’d have a spot to not watch NBA games in increasing numbers. When that expenditure was questioned by an executive of the Friends of the Library, a certain city council member nearly blew a gasket.
So, in the past year, we’ve been able to commit to three quarters of a billion dollars from various sources to build a couple of stadiums and a couple of million more from the city to keep one open that we should have never bought. The smart money says there will be a new Vikings stadium in our future soon, too. God knows what that will cost, but any conservative estimate is that it will be about thirty times the annual operating budget of the Minneapolis Library system.
I’m beginning to agree we indeed have gone about the funding of the libraries in the totally wrong way. “The (Insert Corporate Naming Rights Purchaser Here) Book Stadium” has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
Addenda: More on this today at MNspeak and the Strib edit page, and Nick Coleman’s column.
I am not a baking genius. To be a baking genius, you must adhere to the ethics of the scientist…and I am an artist, dammit!
But there are some things that I have learned to make the cookie onslaught easier.
Butter
Use real butter, holiday cookies deserve it. Not whipped, not margarine, not oleo, not I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, just Land O’ Lakes or Hope Creamery. And stick to unsalted, it’s sweeter and lighter and doesn’t mess with the salt content of the recipe. I’m not usually omniscient enough to pull the butter out of the cooler ahead of time, so the whole “room temperature” thing usually escapes me.
Sugar
Powdered sugar = confectioners sugar
Granulated sugar = table sugar
Splenda/Equal = the Grinch
Flour
All-purpose flour will yield the best cookies. If you are on a big whole wheat kick, be aware that whole wheat flour usually makes for a heavy, chewy cookie. BUT…King Arthur’s White Whole Wheat flour gives you all the nutrition of whole wheat without the hippie-chick branding.
Also, melting a Rolo onto a pretzel is NOT a cookie.