You are a graffiti artist. The city is on to your tricks and sends crews out to clean up your artwork, almost by the next morning. Nearly all the walls in your city neighborhood have now been declared, by city ordinance, off-limits.
You wake up one morning, go out on the street and see a stunning new work of graffiti on one of the forbidden walls. Upon closer examination, you discover that it is an advertisement for Tylenol. Who did this and why did they get away with it? And does Tylenol think they can fool you this way?
Anne Elizabeth Moore's Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing and the Erosion of Integrity is all about how marketing execs find new ways to sneak their messages into your world. Or, more specifically, into Moore's world. She belongs to the original punk movement. Over there in punk-world, they have vowed to live with integrity, free from the influence of corporations. Oh, but those clever people at Nike, Tylenol and Toyota--they have their ways!
This is a book that would make a riveting documentary. Or a week of documentaries, given all the material Moore covers in here. But it's a tough read, especially since, unlike the author, my integrity isn't all that offended.
May I, instead, recommend to you the park bench where I read one of Moore's chapters? It was in Cincinnati. It overlooked a deep bend in the Ohio River. Teenagers, day tourists and limping grandmothers came and went while I fought my way through Moore's indignant prose.
One man parked himself two benches away and studied, with his binoculars, everything from the sailboat masts upriver to the toy houses on the Kentucky side. Then four giggling girls approached him. Would he please be in a quick little video with them? They all lined up and did a choo-choo train dance while a mom recorded it. Then he returned to his seat, smiling, and said, "I haven't moved like that in years."
So, nice park. Just take a better book.
And it wouldn't hurt to bring along a couple of these:
Double Chip Cookies
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Friday, July 13, 2012
Playing with Matches
The grass is a sickly yellow. The shrunken edges of our pond reveal grassy banks that usually remain well hidden. The weeds have taken over every lawn along my walking routes.
Given this droughty state of things, we have been warned not to play with matches around here, or fireworks, or any other sparky things.
I'm on board with this, having recently seen pictures of Colorado cars fleeing in front of a wall of orange flame.
I'm especially on board after reading John Pipkin's Woodsburner, a fictionalized treatment of a real event.
It concerns Henry David Thoreau, of Walden Pond fame. A year before he went into the woods to commune with the flora and fauna, he set them afire one dry and windy April day. He merely wanted to cook a chowder. But the flames outmaneuvered him in short order and rushed towards the town of Concord, Massachusetts.
Pipkin brings Thoreau and three or four other characters to life. There is a preacher addled by opium (his chapters were slow-going for me), a bookseller who hopes to expand his empire and a Scandinavian farm hand. Cow patties aplenty.
As for your recipe, we went all out for fruit salads recently, snapping up blueberries and strawberries and eating them this way and that. You can start with the more healthful version:
Poppy Seed Fruit Salad
Next, you can try something a little more sugared up. Since it features marshmallows, it is, in my mind, a very Mormon salad:
Marshmallow Fruit Salad
Given this droughty state of things, we have been warned not to play with matches around here, or fireworks, or any other sparky things.
I'm on board with this, having recently seen pictures of Colorado cars fleeing in front of a wall of orange flame.
I'm especially on board after reading John Pipkin's Woodsburner, a fictionalized treatment of a real event.
It concerns Henry David Thoreau, of Walden Pond fame. A year before he went into the woods to commune with the flora and fauna, he set them afire one dry and windy April day. He merely wanted to cook a chowder. But the flames outmaneuvered him in short order and rushed towards the town of Concord, Massachusetts.
Pipkin brings Thoreau and three or four other characters to life. There is a preacher addled by opium (his chapters were slow-going for me), a bookseller who hopes to expand his empire and a Scandinavian farm hand. Cow patties aplenty.
As for your recipe, we went all out for fruit salads recently, snapping up blueberries and strawberries and eating them this way and that. You can start with the more healthful version:
Poppy Seed Fruit Salad
Next, you can try something a little more sugared up. Since it features marshmallows, it is, in my mind, a very Mormon salad:
Marshmallow Fruit Salad
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Great Undertakings
Sometimes, if you think you're not due to die soon, and you can summon the energy and concentration, you embark upon a Great Undertaking.
Great Undertakings are projects that you can't conquer in a day. Or a week. It could be raising a child from diapers to driver's license. It could be shepherding a constitutional amendment through ratification. It could be cutting out a valley with only a glacier for a tool.
Or it could be reading Alice Schroeder's The Snowball, all 800-something pages of it.
Schroeder's biography of financier Warren Buffett portrays his precocious childhood wherein he often sat on his front porch, writing down license plate numbers of cars turning at a nearby corner. Should a crime ever be committed down that street, Warren believed he could hand over numbers and help the police solve the case.
Warren exhibited the same ambition when he landed in the hospital with appendicitis. His doting aunt gave the bored boy a fingerprinting kit and he went about fingerprinting all the nuns in the hospital, just in case they, too, slipped off the straight and narrow way.
Warren's quirky hobbies taught him the art of handicapping, of reading probabilities. This came in quite handy when he grew up, for Warren decided to make a million dollars by age 35. Since he didn't care much for manual labor, he invested in the stock market. Warren met his goal and, like a movie buff who can't stop reaching into the popcorn bucket, just kept on going. The man simply can't help himself. The money keeps rolling in, somewhere in the hundreds of billions by now.
I patiently waded through a few too many pages of financial arcana in hopes of getting the scoop on Warren's personal life. Let's just say that, were he your neighbor, his marital status would have you gossiping over the fence. How in the world did all the parties agree to the arrangement? What made each of them say, "Yep, I'm OK with that"?
After such marathon reading, I rewarded myself with Diana Lopez' Confetti Girl. It's a middle schooler story with a Latino flavor. It's quick, it's lightweight, it's got a likable heroine and her crazy socks.
As for your recipe, we glorified our hot dogs this week with a tasty Coney Island Sauce.
This recipe celebrates my recent week in Detroit where, every suburb I drove through had a "koney island"-type restaurant, leading me to believe that a lot of Michigan people landed there from the East Coast and they miss the old neighborhoods.
Great Undertakings are projects that you can't conquer in a day. Or a week. It could be raising a child from diapers to driver's license. It could be shepherding a constitutional amendment through ratification. It could be cutting out a valley with only a glacier for a tool.
Or it could be reading Alice Schroeder's The Snowball, all 800-something pages of it.
Schroeder's biography of financier Warren Buffett portrays his precocious childhood wherein he often sat on his front porch, writing down license plate numbers of cars turning at a nearby corner. Should a crime ever be committed down that street, Warren believed he could hand over numbers and help the police solve the case.
Warren exhibited the same ambition when he landed in the hospital with appendicitis. His doting aunt gave the bored boy a fingerprinting kit and he went about fingerprinting all the nuns in the hospital, just in case they, too, slipped off the straight and narrow way.
Warren's quirky hobbies taught him the art of handicapping, of reading probabilities. This came in quite handy when he grew up, for Warren decided to make a million dollars by age 35. Since he didn't care much for manual labor, he invested in the stock market. Warren met his goal and, like a movie buff who can't stop reaching into the popcorn bucket, just kept on going. The man simply can't help himself. The money keeps rolling in, somewhere in the hundreds of billions by now.
I patiently waded through a few too many pages of financial arcana in hopes of getting the scoop on Warren's personal life. Let's just say that, were he your neighbor, his marital status would have you gossiping over the fence. How in the world did all the parties agree to the arrangement? What made each of them say, "Yep, I'm OK with that"?
After such marathon reading, I rewarded myself with Diana Lopez' Confetti Girl. It's a middle schooler story with a Latino flavor. It's quick, it's lightweight, it's got a likable heroine and her crazy socks.
As for your recipe, we glorified our hot dogs this week with a tasty Coney Island Sauce.
This recipe celebrates my recent week in Detroit where, every suburb I drove through had a "koney island"-type restaurant, leading me to believe that a lot of Michigan people landed there from the East Coast and they miss the old neighborhoods.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Scattered and Bloody
As 24-hour news stories go, I missed it.
I lost hours of my life to hanging chads, to O.J.'s glove, to a girl named Monica and unmentionable things one can do with cigars (so sorry for that one, kids), but I totally missed one of the biggies. I went to Relief Society one night where somebody, in the opening prayer, asked God to comfort those in the school shooting in Colorado and I said "Amen," opened my eyes and asked the ladies next to me, "What school shooting?"
By the time I tuned in to the events at Columbine High School, they had become a somewhat coherent story, with a who, what, when and where. But, as documented by Dave Cullen in his book, Columbine, to the people in the middle of the drama, it was a far more confusing event.
To the students trapped inside the school, it was a hunkering down in classrooms as violent noises erupted from somewhere down the hall. It was calling the news station on their cell phones and watching the anchors up on the classroom TVs talk to them.
To the police and SWAT teams assembled around the perimeter of the school, it was a foggy puzzle. How many assailants were in there? Fleeing students gave conflicting stories. "Guys in trench coats." "Guys in t-shirts." "Guys in hats." It sounded like an army, roving about with unpredictable aim and motive.
To the friends of the assailants, it was a series of lightbulb moments, when they strung together clues that they had overlooked recently in Eric and Dylan's behavior. It was the discovery that they might have aided the attack. Weren't they there when the murderers bought the guns, the bomb materials? Was that what Eric and Dylan had planned to do with these weapons?
To the parents gathered at a local elementary school, it was a long wait for the list of survivors to appear. And to some of those parents, it was an all-day wait with no word until they were finally herded into a room with comforting phrases, and maybe even some doughnuts, and finally told the bad news.
To the parents of the murderers, it was an awful awakening to their own cluelessness, for which I don't blame them, having been a clueless parent myself. It was the first day of the rest their lives, now marred as they bore the brunt of the public's anger.
Cullen devotes several chapters to the psychology of the killers, and a few more to the suits and countersuits that started flying once the initial shock wore off. Those chapters were tough to slog through. Thank goodness for other chapters documenting how the widowed and the severely injured picked up the pieces of their lives.
But enough about horror. Let's talk about brownies instead. I think you will find Favorite Frosted Brownies difficult to resist.
I lost hours of my life to hanging chads, to O.J.'s glove, to a girl named Monica and unmentionable things one can do with cigars (so sorry for that one, kids), but I totally missed one of the biggies. I went to Relief Society one night where somebody, in the opening prayer, asked God to comfort those in the school shooting in Colorado and I said "Amen," opened my eyes and asked the ladies next to me, "What school shooting?"
By the time I tuned in to the events at Columbine High School, they had become a somewhat coherent story, with a who, what, when and where. But, as documented by Dave Cullen in his book, Columbine, to the people in the middle of the drama, it was a far more confusing event.
To the students trapped inside the school, it was a hunkering down in classrooms as violent noises erupted from somewhere down the hall. It was calling the news station on their cell phones and watching the anchors up on the classroom TVs talk to them.
To the police and SWAT teams assembled around the perimeter of the school, it was a foggy puzzle. How many assailants were in there? Fleeing students gave conflicting stories. "Guys in trench coats." "Guys in t-shirts." "Guys in hats." It sounded like an army, roving about with unpredictable aim and motive.
To the friends of the assailants, it was a series of lightbulb moments, when they strung together clues that they had overlooked recently in Eric and Dylan's behavior. It was the discovery that they might have aided the attack. Weren't they there when the murderers bought the guns, the bomb materials? Was that what Eric and Dylan had planned to do with these weapons?
To the parents gathered at a local elementary school, it was a long wait for the list of survivors to appear. And to some of those parents, it was an all-day wait with no word until they were finally herded into a room with comforting phrases, and maybe even some doughnuts, and finally told the bad news.
To the parents of the murderers, it was an awful awakening to their own cluelessness, for which I don't blame them, having been a clueless parent myself. It was the first day of the rest their lives, now marred as they bore the brunt of the public's anger.
Cullen devotes several chapters to the psychology of the killers, and a few more to the suits and countersuits that started flying once the initial shock wore off. Those chapters were tough to slog through. Thank goodness for other chapters documenting how the widowed and the severely injured picked up the pieces of their lives.
But enough about horror. Let's talk about brownies instead. I think you will find Favorite Frosted Brownies difficult to resist.
The woman who submitted the recipe likes to serve it in a Valentine dinner for her sweetie. We lacked a special occasion, but that's never stopped us before.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Opera On The Cheap
Joseph Volpe almost persuades me to buy a ticket to the opera.
His memoir, The Toughest Show on Earth, recounts his rise from crack backstage carpenter to general manager of the Met. Along the way, his long hours ruined two marriages and his blunt manner (by his account) saved the beloved New York institution from union fights and out-of-control divas.
Since the Met is not real handy to me right now, I'd have to check out local opera. Somehow I doubt that I'd see the same elaborate, big-budget scenery that Volpe's directors put on the stage:
"Twelve Indonesian birds and seven pear puppets, carried by twenty running puppeteers, had to com and go during arias and duets. . . . A Las Vegas chorus of bird-headed showgirls on stilts had to peck and prance around Papageno as he fantasized about finding himself a girlfriend."
I also doubt my local opera offers running subtitles on little monitors mounted on the back of the chairs, another Volpe innovation. My, my, how that would enhance the show.
I guess I'll just make do with Volpe's book, in which he reveals which singers are the flakiest and flightiest. Is it the sopranos? The tenors? The basses? Read and find out.
He also vows that opera stars can come from anywhere, citing the case of one Charles Taylor, who was once a farmhand in Arizona, and a meth addict to boot. Let this be a lesson to those of us who have not yet reached our dreams.
My book pile also included a quittee: Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles. This skinny little book is a fictional letter of complaint. It sounded like a fun premise. Strangely, it was not fun at all.
I'm also about to give up on the current book on my nightstand, White Savage by Fintan O'Toole. 'Tis a very cluttered history about William Johnson of our pre-Revolutionary era. I suppose he acted as a liaison between European and Indian cultures, but I may never know for sure because O'Toole's exhaustive work is losing me fast. However, I've had some very nice naps with his book in my hands.
As for your recipe, Taco-Filled Pasta Shells was a dish that came together easily after a hard week of crashing computers, a crock-pot dinner spoiled by a faulty electrical outlet and, worst of all, a cat adoption gone bad. It was comfort food indeed. It also makes extra to freeze for later.
Mine looked much juicier than what you'll find in the picture.
His memoir, The Toughest Show on Earth, recounts his rise from crack backstage carpenter to general manager of the Met. Along the way, his long hours ruined two marriages and his blunt manner (by his account) saved the beloved New York institution from union fights and out-of-control divas.
Since the Met is not real handy to me right now, I'd have to check out local opera. Somehow I doubt that I'd see the same elaborate, big-budget scenery that Volpe's directors put on the stage:
"Twelve Indonesian birds and seven pear puppets, carried by twenty running puppeteers, had to com and go during arias and duets. . . . A Las Vegas chorus of bird-headed showgirls on stilts had to peck and prance around Papageno as he fantasized about finding himself a girlfriend."
I also doubt my local opera offers running subtitles on little monitors mounted on the back of the chairs, another Volpe innovation. My, my, how that would enhance the show.
I guess I'll just make do with Volpe's book, in which he reveals which singers are the flakiest and flightiest. Is it the sopranos? The tenors? The basses? Read and find out.
He also vows that opera stars can come from anywhere, citing the case of one Charles Taylor, who was once a farmhand in Arizona, and a meth addict to boot. Let this be a lesson to those of us who have not yet reached our dreams.
My book pile also included a quittee: Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles. This skinny little book is a fictional letter of complaint. It sounded like a fun premise. Strangely, it was not fun at all.
I'm also about to give up on the current book on my nightstand, White Savage by Fintan O'Toole. 'Tis a very cluttered history about William Johnson of our pre-Revolutionary era. I suppose he acted as a liaison between European and Indian cultures, but I may never know for sure because O'Toole's exhaustive work is losing me fast. However, I've had some very nice naps with his book in my hands.
As for your recipe, Taco-Filled Pasta Shells was a dish that came together easily after a hard week of crashing computers, a crock-pot dinner spoiled by a faulty electrical outlet and, worst of all, a cat adoption gone bad. It was comfort food indeed. It also makes extra to freeze for later.
Mine looked much juicier than what you'll find in the picture.
Sunday, April 8, 2012
White People Like Eating Outdoors
I'm in the mood for a picnic these days. After all, the sun is shining. The tulips are out.
Never mind that those tulips are shivering in the brisk wind out there. From my kitchen window, it certainly looks like a great day for eating under a tree. This illusion is probably what spurred me to add Grilled Sub Sandwich to the menu. I hope to try it again when the tulips stop shivering.
As for the Finished Book Pile, today we have Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions by Christian Lander. Lander skewers a certain kind of white people: hipsters. I read through his book, laughing with an air of superiority because I'm not into free-trade coffee or pretending to be Canadian or Being the Only White Person Around or Having Two Last Names. But white people are also into eating outdoors (see above) so, oops!, I guess I'm busted, not to mention that I like gentrification and Netflix and Manhattan and scarves. Still, I'm pretty much a failure as a white person/hipster. But that made Lander's book all the more fun.
Never mind that those tulips are shivering in the brisk wind out there. From my kitchen window, it certainly looks like a great day for eating under a tree. This illusion is probably what spurred me to add Grilled Sub Sandwich to the menu. I hope to try it again when the tulips stop shivering.
As for the Finished Book Pile, today we have Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions by Christian Lander. Lander skewers a certain kind of white people: hipsters. I read through his book, laughing with an air of superiority because I'm not into free-trade coffee or pretending to be Canadian or Being the Only White Person Around or Having Two Last Names. But white people are also into eating outdoors (see above) so, oops!, I guess I'm busted, not to mention that I like gentrification and Netflix and Manhattan and scarves. Still, I'm pretty much a failure as a white person/hipster. But that made Lander's book all the more fun.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Send Me to Istanbul
Here I sit in the airport, having survived the indignities of check-in, but sad that I'm not taking a trip like the one Paul Theroux describes in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.
Or maybe not. His trip, a retracing of the journey he wrote about in The Great Railway Bazaar, takes him through Romania, where "The look of Bucharest was desperate and naked, . . . everyone struggling, everyone dressed as though for a hike on a rainy day or dirty job."
Or maybe so, because he also passes through Istanbul , "habitable, a city with the soul of a village . . . the sight of its mosques and churches can be almost heart-stopping, . . . Most of all I like the city for its completeness and its self-sufficiency; it is a finished work, distinctly itself." It is "dramatic in its vistas, its spaces, its mixed population....great for walking, or taking a ferry from embankment to embankment, ... the bazaars, the gardens, the promenades, the fish markets, and the fruit stalls . . ."
When I read those passages, my birthday was coming up and I couldn't think of anything to want but a trip to Istanbul, 'cause there's nothing I love better than vistas, gardens and places to walk.
But I settled for a box of frozen Ding-Dongs instead.
Moving along, Theroux's journey pulls him through Turkmenistan,.where the bumbling despot in charge of the amusingly miserable little nation has renamed all the days of the month and the week after his family and friends.
Then, on to Bangalore. All those jobs that left America? They landed in Bangalore. I'm sure you have all gotten your share of calls from "Larry" or "Steve" whose accent was so thick, you weren't sure whether you just ordered a new shirt or sold your twenty shares of Apple stock.
Maybe you were peeved enough to demand that next time they hand you off to a native speaker of English.Well, "Larry" and "Steve" are on to that little trick. They've been practicing their American accents and they know how to sound just like your cousin in Ashtabula.
I'm sorry if this news ruins your week. If so, you might comfort yourself with a helping of Ravioli with Sausage.
I'm stuffed in a middle seat on the plane now, not headed for Istanbul. Just gonna have to make do with Denver.
Or maybe not. His trip, a retracing of the journey he wrote about in The Great Railway Bazaar, takes him through Romania, where "The look of Bucharest was desperate and naked, . . . everyone struggling, everyone dressed as though for a hike on a rainy day or dirty job."
Or maybe so, because he also passes through Istanbul , "habitable, a city with the soul of a village . . . the sight of its mosques and churches can be almost heart-stopping, . . . Most of all I like the city for its completeness and its self-sufficiency; it is a finished work, distinctly itself." It is "dramatic in its vistas, its spaces, its mixed population....great for walking, or taking a ferry from embankment to embankment, ... the bazaars, the gardens, the promenades, the fish markets, and the fruit stalls . . ."
When I read those passages, my birthday was coming up and I couldn't think of anything to want but a trip to Istanbul, 'cause there's nothing I love better than vistas, gardens and places to walk.
But I settled for a box of frozen Ding-Dongs instead.
Moving along, Theroux's journey pulls him through Turkmenistan,.where the bumbling despot in charge of the amusingly miserable little nation has renamed all the days of the month and the week after his family and friends.
Then, on to Bangalore. All those jobs that left America? They landed in Bangalore. I'm sure you have all gotten your share of calls from "Larry" or "Steve" whose accent was so thick, you weren't sure whether you just ordered a new shirt or sold your twenty shares of Apple stock.
Maybe you were peeved enough to demand that next time they hand you off to a native speaker of English.Well, "Larry" and "Steve" are on to that little trick. They've been practicing their American accents and they know how to sound just like your cousin in Ashtabula.
I'm sorry if this news ruins your week. If so, you might comfort yourself with a helping of Ravioli with Sausage.
I'm stuffed in a middle seat on the plane now, not headed for Istanbul. Just gonna have to make do with Denver.
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