Sol Olmstead performs at the Second Annual Winter Commission

Some recording notes:  Again, this was taken from the night of February 20, 2010 at the American Museum of Radio and Electricity. Erin’s art was projected with a classic slide projector. In fact, the whole performance was all-analog, at least until we got our grubby little hands on it. Sol’s performance was captured on Jubal’s camcorder, and I believe Alan shot the handheld video for this segment. Alan stepped in quite a bit (with zero notice or incentive) to capture a huge swath of the entertainment that night, and the resulting video is quite good. For that I thank him. Thanks to Sol and Erin for creating a really cool multimedia experience.

-Ross
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Related posts:

1. Biagio Biondolillo performs at the Winter Commission
2. The Young Person’s Field Guide to Untrustworthy Individuals

Related posts:

1. Biagio Biondolillo performs at the Winter Commission
2. Sol Olmstead performs at the Second Annual Winter Commission
3. A Child’s Guide to Heliciculture, or The Story of the Little Grey Snails

Biagio Biondolillo performs at the Winter Commission

Some recording notes:  I included Biagio’s sound check so that you get a feel for our commitment to TOTAL AUTHENTICITY in our presentation of the events of the Winter Commission.  That said, I cheated quite a bit in making everything look good so don’t set your phasers to lionize just yet.

Biagio’s set took place at the Second Annual Winter Commission, an art event we have held twice, this time at the American Museum of Radio and Electricity in Bellingham, WA on February 20, 2010.  This year’s theme was “A Night of Art and Science”.  Video was provided from two different sources, my Canon HV20 camcorder, and Jubal’s ancient (but durable) classic camcorder.  There wasn’t a lot of light for this set, so everything is a little grainy.  Eric shot the video on the HV20. Multi-track sound was recorded directly at a high bit rate directly from the board, a Mackie Onyx 1620i. Katie took some great shots from the mezzanine earlier in the night, so I spliced those shots in to give a feel for how many people were there. The resulting presentation is weird and a little disjointed but hopefully conveys the spirit of the evening and captures Biagio’s performance as best we could.  Stay tuned for more performances from the Winter Commission, here on youareweare.com

Also, included is an mp3 of the entire performance:

Biagio Live @ The Second Annual Winter Commission
-Ross
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Related posts:

1. Sol Olmstead performs at the Second Annual Winter Commission
2. The Young Person’s Field Guide to Untrustworthy Individuals
3. Show Review: Biagio Biondolillo w/ Anna Arvan and Kat Bula at Temple Bar 10.18.09

The Mendacity of Hope

There is nothing so insufferable as someone who mistakes being offensive for being original. I should know; I make at least ten insufficiently thought-out provocative statements a day, usually in the name of trying to be funny. Yesterday, these included:

1. Men with short moms always date tall women;
2. Old West people cared a lot about candle games because they didn’t have anything better to do;
3. All women ever talk about when they are alone is Leif Garrett and yeast infections;
4. The State of the Union is on at different times on different coasts (total lie);
5. Everybody should quit trying to have relationships and just go on tennis dates;
6. Everybody in the band Petra is ugly in a way that nobody else has ever been before in human history;
7. Baby Boomers, on average, have had way more sexual partners than members of Gen X and Gen Y.
8. All cats want to work at least eight hours a day, and they will if you give them the right platform;
9. The recession is making people want to dye their hair all the time;
10. Weevils are different from boll weevils (this is actually true, but I wasn’t totally sure, so technically this was an intellectually irresponsible claim to make.)

Most of these statements are not particularly true or even verifiable; for me, therein lies their charm. In his short essay, “The Case Against Women,” satirist James Thurber makes the fairly trenchant point that women are hateful because they never get anything quite right–for instance, they never have exact change, and they’re prone to slight misquotations and other mistakes: “They will tell you to take the 2:57 train, on a day that the 2:57 does not run, or, if it does run, does not stop at the station where you are supposed to get off. Many men, separated from a woman by this particular form off imprecision, have never showed up in her life again. Nothing so embitters a man as to end up in Bridgeport when he was supposed to get off at Westport.”

Thurber is exaggerating for comic effect, of course, but there is a kernel of truth buried in his accusations. I think that women often enjoy exaggerating for dramatic effect (and by “women,” I kind of mean “women,” but maybe I just mean “me.”) It stems back to one’s teenage years, where everything either was described as either eternal or impossible. Your mom was Always Completely Unreasonable and you were Never Allowed to Do Anything. Your life could only be described as either The Worst Existence That Anyone Has Ever Had to Suffer Through or The Best, Most Charmed Existence Possible . Usually, your life was The Worst, but even this had a kind of excitement to it–after all, if anybody ever made a movie of your life, surely the audience would be impressed by the length and breadth of your suffering.

Being an adult (or at least, an adult-aged individual), is a lot more boring than being a teenage girl. The stakes are somehow lower. Having roasted chicken for dinner is no longer The Best; it’s just Quite Good, and waiting in line for coffee isn’t The Worst, it’s just Sucky.

Why Are You So Obsessed With Me?

All of which goes to say that making the occasional broad generalization can be enlivening to the soul, especially if it outrages someone. You get to recapture the defiant joy of such Famous Teenage Girl Wars as I Don’t Have to Sit With You for Dinner Constantly if I Don’t Want To, a justly renowned skirmish that occurred when your mom wanted All of Us to Eat Dinner as a Family, Just for Once. It was an absolute pleasure to inform your parents that Nobody Else in Your Grade Has to Eat Dinner with Their Family on Weeknights–in Fact, Nobody Even Knows Anybody Who Has Ever Heard of This Happening, Anywhere. Indignantly, your parents attempted to rebut that they ate dinner with their families on every weeknight as a matter of course, only to be crushed by the withering assertion that They Don’t Count, and also the query, Why Are You So Obsessed with Me?

These battles were fun because you didn’t really care about the outcome–you were just into the Zen of battle. The secret to winning every battle is to engage only with enemies who are more invested than you are–that way, you win even when you lose.

This is why making intellectually irresponsible statements can be so incredibly fun–you don’t really care about whether Moravia was once the most powerful country in the world; you just care about freaking out the person who knows that Moravia was never the most powerful country in the world. That is because the person who forgot more about the history of Moravia than you ever knew is either a nine-year-old girl or a middle-class white guy that subscribes to Harper’s.

If there’s one thing that nine-year-old girls and Harper’s subscribers like to tell you about, it’s rules. They’re desperate to inform you of what you are and are not allowed to do; and if they observe any infractions of the rules, they’re desperate to tell on you. We know that nine-year-old girls are like this because of various cognitive growth patterns that they are experiencing at that particular stage of development, which generally have to do with building the brain’s capacity for logic and reason, which cause them to see the world in more black-and-white terms than they will later in life; however, we have no explanation for what is wrong with the Harper’s subscribers.

Nine-year-old girl . . . or Harper's subscriber?

Everybody’s tired of “pop culture critics” (i.e., sad nerds) writing “think pieces” (i.e., rants) about this topic. What can be said about Harper’s subscribers that Bust’s infamous “Wimpster” article didn’t say better? Isn’t criticizing today’s young Harper’s subscribers for being more sensitive than earlier generations of Harper’s subscribers secretly anti-feminist, because it validates right-wing reactionary assumptions about how the whole politically correct revolution was actually a bunch of anti-male propaganda that will result in everybody getting murdered by a handful of thugs when the apocalypse hits, because our brave young Harper’s subscribers will be too limp-wristed to lift their shotguns in defense of our helpless womenfolk and toddlers? Aren’t young women who complain about Harper’s subscribers simply lending credence to jerks like Christopher Hitchens, who like to run around positing that the reason “Twilight” is so popular is that what women really want, deep down, is to get murdered by a slick Vice subscriber instead of doing it with a kindly Harper’s subscriber ?

The answer to all of these questions is no. Blaming Harper’s subscribers is always the right thing to do. The Harper’s subscribers of this world are not more sensitive than Vice subscribers; they’re just more sneaky. If political correctness forces Harper’s subscribers to be more sneaky about their sexism, it’s good, because it means that they are at least slightly ashamed of it. The apocalypse will turn out okay because of this: while “cultural critics” have been sitting around obsessing about Harper’s subscribers, the women of America have been busy taking up all the slots in college, dominating the workforce, and watching the heck out of Golden Girls . And the popularity of shows like CSI: Rapin’ and Law and Order: More Rapin’ prove that everybody–men, uncles, ladies, moms, babies, and grandmas–likes to sit around pretending that they are rapists/killers/emotionally troubled cops. Does this prove that your grandma wants to be a rapin’ cop? No–it just proves that she thinks they are cool, and all “Twilight” proves is that teenage girls think monsters are cool as well. This is because most teenage girls are monsters. I cannot emphasize this enough.

Anyway! The point I am building toward, unwrapping petal by petal to reveal the mighty Georgia O’Keefe stamen quivering in the center of this enormous flower of generalizations, is this:

Harper’s is evil. Maybe as evil as teenage girls; I don’t know. It’s hard for me to get my mind around that much evil.

Harper’s is evil because its whole point is to make dudes feel so hopeless that they do nothing except bring up things they read in Harper’s at parties in order to make other politically engaged people (i.e., women and other Others) feel dumb and similarly hopeless. “Oh, are you actually voting?,” they sneer, as they take a judicious slurp of Negro Modelo. “How quaint!”

If questioned about what, exactly, is so quaint about voting (or whatever the political action in question is), they inevitably reply with some garbled regurgitation of an essay they read in Harper’s. The title of the essay is usually something like “Totally Fucked: A Harper’s Polemic,” or “State of the Union: Deathy.”

A great example of this phenomenon is “The Mendacity of Hope,” a recent essay by the even more recently departed editor of Harper’s, Roger Hodge. It’s an annoying essay that you can’t read if you don’t have a Harper’s subscription (although a weird, poorly formatted version of it is here, if you want to read it.) Hodge starts out with a cool blanket attack on Obama for not being a unicorn Jesus:

“A year and more has passed, yet we have not been delivered. Some believed that Barack Obama had come to restore the Republic, to return our nation to the righteous path. A new, glorious era in American politics was at hand. If only that were true. We all can taste the bitterness now. Obama promised to end the war in Iraq, end torture, close Guantánamo, restore the constitution, heal our wounds, wash our feet. None of these things has come to pass.”

First of all, this is an facile way to begin an attack on Obama’s presidency. It’s not fair to accuse Obama of sucking because he hasn’t immediately changed everything about American government, because that is an impossible task for one person to undertake. By setting the bar so incredibly high for Obama to “succeed,” Hodge is setting Obama up to fail miserably. Evaluated in such harsh terms, would even a Lincoln or Washington live up to Hodge’s expectations?

Living up to expectations

Hodge then narrows down his attack on Obama to a critique of the president’s foreign policy. This is very clever. Obama’s foreign policy has been less than stellar, and provides fertile ground for scathing criticisms. However, Hodge didn’t start out by attacking Obama’s foreign policy; he started out by attacking his entire presidency. Yet Hodge never explains his arguments against Obama’s entire presidency, just against his foreign policy. His initial generalizations trick the reader into siding with Hodge on Obama’s failure to come up to scratch on being a magical pony; and Hodge’s critiques of Obama’s foreign policy cause the reader to retroactively condemn Obama’s entire presidency, because Hodge effortlessly switches rhetorically back and forth between the two. Yet he never touches upon the other aspects of Obama’s presidency, focusing instead on Obama’s weakest points. This is not objective analysis.

Hodge then goes into a fairly astute inventory of how Obama has failed to end the war, close Guantanamo, or restore due process and other legal principles which the Bush administration repealed in order to be all “24″ all the time. All of this is quite useful and valid critique, but then Hodge u-turns into an ad hominem attack on the president and his supporters:

“That Obama is in most respects better than George W. Bush, John McCain, Sarah Palin, or Joseph Stalin is beyond dispute and completely beside the point. Obama is judged not as a man but as a fable, a tale of moral uplift that redeems the sins of America’s shameful past. Even as many casual supporters begin to show their inevitable displeasure with his “job performance,” and his poll numbers decline, the character and motivations of the president remain above question. He is a good man. I trust him to do the right thing.”

This is fairly crazy and there’s a lot to unpack here. First of all, it is a logical fallacy that the fact that Obama is not a crazy hawk like Bush, McCain, Palin or Stalin doesn’t matter. It matters a great deal. If people hadn’t supported Obama by voting for him, we would have McCain (or maybe Palin) as President right now, and it would be raining blood. In fact, many Americans wish it was raining blood, so the ability of the President to limit bloodshed at this point has very real, non-abstract consequences: it means that less people are being killed.

Secondly, the fact that Obama is being judged as a magical unicorn is not Obama’s fault. The reasons he is being judged as a unicorn are many, some of them having to do with his being the first black president (and thus carrying an unimaginable burden of expectations, due to our weird racist country), others stemming from other sources, among them rabid media hyping. Which is exactly what Hodge was engaging in at the beginning of this essay. Although he was trying to be biting and witty, he was also couching his coming critique of Obama on a mythic level (one that included specific references to Jesus), in order to make his take-down of Obama all the more epic.

Quit screwing up Obama's foreign policy, Hugh Laurie.

The third weird thing about this paragraph is Hodge’s appropriation of what he imagines to be the voice of Obama’s supporters. I’m not sure I understand what people’s opinions of Obama’s character have to do with Obama’s foreign policy. Obama is not doing a lousy job at foreign policy because people admire him, and so conflating Obama fever with Obama’s policy failures is to lay the blame for both at Obama’s feet, which again is not particularly fair. Furthermore, it is condescending and a little strange for Hodge to go into a little fantasy about the mind of the Obama supporter. In his mind, Obama supporters all speak like Forrest Gump. It’s hard not to read this critique as having less to do with what Hodge thinks of Obama’s foreign policy and more to do with his dislike of enthusiastic, hopeful Obama-supporting youth. Hodge is entitled to his opinions, but it’s an unfair jab to slip in.

Hodge goes on to tell us what he really thinks of Obama supporters:

“It is not surprising that unsophisticated children, naive Europeans, and Democratic partisans continue to revere the heroic former candidate, despite everything he has done and left undone.”

Oh man. What are we going to do with all these naive Europeans and unsophisticated children, I mean Democratic partisans? The implication here is that if you support Obama, you must be some kind of brain-dead French teenage hippie, not a Smart White Texan-American like Roger Hodge. Has Roger shamed you out of your Obama support yet, young white dudes? Has he convinced you that voting for Democrats is so gauche?

“Puzzling, however, is the fact that Obama, until fairly recently an obscure striver in the Chicago Democratic machine, continues to inspire perfervid devotion among intellectual liberals who know their history. Even they say: Be patient. Give him time. It’s hard to change the government. Or, more cynically: He’s the best we can do. Thus, his most sophisticated admirers assume the burden of Obama’s sins, bite their tongues, and indulge the temptation to frame his shortcomings as our own. Obama is not to blame; we are to blame. Obama has not failed us; America has failed him.”

I actually think that these are really great arguments in Obama’s favor. And I hate how Hodge once again frames his arguments against them with classist sarcasm. Roger is just so confused about how smart, middle-class white men could still support Obama! After all, they’ve got book-learning, unlike blacks and poors. “Intellectual liberals who know their history” is obviously code for “white people who went to college,” in case you were wondering. And by appropriating the voice of the Obama supporter (i.e., “Be patient. Give him time”), Hodge makes that supporter sound dumb in the same way your little brother used to make you sound dumb when he parroted everything you said in a high falsetto voice. It didn’t matter that the content of what you were saying wasn’t ridiculous; once it was reframed as satire, it became ridiculous. Pointing out that a year isn’t a very long time to reinvent the American political system isn’t stupid; neither is pointing out that, in a two-party system, Obama was by far the more attractive option. I hate those geniuses who decide that the way to destroy the two-party system is to vote for some no-hope candidate during a major election. Anybody who was really serious about that would work on electing third-party candidates to smaller offices while simultaneously seeking campaign reform. Instead, these jokers like to smugly not vote at all, or else vote for somebody unelectable and then gloat about how they’re “taking down the system.” Nader-supporting wonderboys like this helped hand over the country to criminals in 2000.

It's true!

Finally, I will never argue against anyone who points out that Obama is not our country’s dad. For the record, Obama is not, in fact, our country’s dad. It’s not “assum[ing] the burden of [his] sins” to admit that. We aren’t really supposed to look to a magical paternalistic leader to save us all; Hodge of all people should agree with that. No lone person could or should assume the burden of fixing our country–the onus is on us.

After that, Hodge starts bitching about some book he didn’t like. This takes up the bulk of the essay. It’s called “Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State,” and it’s all about how the executive branch of government came to have too much power. Hodge agrees with the author, Garry Wills, up to a point–he thinks that various historical and technological events caused the executive branch to get all swelled and perverted, but he actually thinks that the whole government system was totally fucked from the start, and cites some song and some historical dude in order to prove it. All of this is fairly interesting and astute, as usual–Hodge isn’t dumb–but it’s not necessarily to the point. He’s trying to establish a historical precedent for what he sees as Obama’s fuck-ups, but weirdly, he disagrees with Wills’ ultimate conclusion, which is that any president would have a difficult time wielding this enormous executive power in an ethical way. Wills’ describes the problem thusly:

“Perhaps it should come as no surprise, that turning around the huge secret empire built by the National Security State is a hard, perhaps impossible task . . . A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire’s secrets. . . . He becomes a prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the Bomb, a modern President cannot not use his huge power base. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is a self-entangling giant.”

This pisses Hodge off, for some reason–he sees it as Obama apologetics, even though he totally agrees that the executive branch is out of control. I don’t understand how this is logical, unless and except is Hodge is personally pissed off at Obama for nebulous reasons. Then Hodge gets mad that Wills pointed out that if Obama tried to immediately end the Afghan war, he’d never get re-elected. Hodge is mad because, as he points out, Obama never promised to end the war immediately. I’m not sure how this adds up to Obama being a big liar, but Hodge somehow does the math, including another cool ad hominem attack on Obama’s character:

“Let us grant that Barack Obama is as intelligent as his admirers insist. What evidence do we possess that he is also a moral virtuoso? What evidence do we possess that he is a good, wise, or even a decent man? Yes, he can be eloquent, yet eloquence is no guarantee of wisdom or of virtue. Yes, he has a nice family, but that evinces a private morality. Public morality requires public action, and all available public evidence points to a man with the character of a common politician, whose singular ambition in life was to attain power; nothing in Barack Obama’s political career suggests that he would ever willingly commit to a course of action that would cost him an election.”

Roger Hodge, I just don’t understand what Obama’s morality has to do with his foreign policy, just as I didn’t understand what Clinton’s panty shredding had to do with his political performance. As for politicians wanting to get re-elected–of course they do. And let’s not pretend that the Afghanistan foreign policy wouldn’t be far worse if Obama doesn’t get re-elected; frankly, I somehow don’t trust that President Palin or Beck would wake up one day and decide to pull all the troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq tout de suite.

Hodge ends the essay by saying that Obama is a big power-grubbing jerk and we should all be against him.

“The Mendacity of Hope” is the perfect Harper’s essay. It begins from a carefully situated position of negativity, calculated to make the reader feel as much despair and horror as possible, producing this reaction through false dichotomies spun out of the finest unrealistic, idealistic pixie dust. All politicians except Dennis Kucinich are The Worst! The Constitution is The Best, except that we Never Follow It. Things are always going to be Totally Fucked, because of History and also Giant Semi-Abstract Ineffable Systems. Like all good Harper’s essays, it manages to not only make you feel as if the present is totally ruined, it also makes you feel retroactive fear about the past and anticipatory dread regarding the future. It talks about how even the smartest people in the world are totally dumb and misguided, and it describes mythical masses of people who are even more misguided and dumb. The purpose of all this negging is to trick you into agreeing with it, after which you get to feel a small, bitter glow of satisfaction that you, at least, as not as dumb as the rest of these proles. By the end of it, you feel like killing yourself in some dramatically depressing fashion, like walking into the ocean or shooting a bunch of heroin with Fisher Stevens. You feel like you’ve accomplished something just by getting through that Harper’s essay, and you take out the pain of the experience on others by lecturing them pedantically at cocktail parties and barbeques. People start becoming afraid to talk to you, and like all outsiders, you try to make this a mark of pride instead of shame, so you become a Harper’s subscriber. Soon you’ve succumbed to yelling at people who drink out of paper cups and drying your armpits with magical crystals and having open marriages and never, ever voting. You’ve become the most evil thing of all–an adult-aged teenage girl. And this is why Harper’s is evil.

Please understand, I’m not arguing against education and journalism and careful thought. I’m not asking that people blindly believe in their elected leaders, as if they were Gods. I’m just sick of this Thoreau bullshit. I like Thoreau, but he was a giant emo. He was just another nature writer libertarian weirdo until Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X got inspired by his ideas and decided to put them into action. The fact is that reading is not a form of political action, and I think that Harper’s likes to try to trick you into thinking that it is.

Giant emo.

Harper’s subscribers love the idea that ideas are more important than action, and that the person having the ideas is more important than the person executing them. This is how they justify the current sad capitalist structure, wherein a dude plays his Wii in an office and has an idea once a week while a bunch of ladies go around actually organizing things and figuring out how to make the idea happen. They love the idea that you are effective when you are just sitting around maintenance-masturbating and having thoughts, that you can somehow get credit for it. But it isn’t true. Ideas are not particularly valuable. Anybody with sufficient time and energy can sit around having them, and even then they don’t matter unless elbow grease is put behind them.

Intellectual currency needs to be devalued and re-evaluated. In a world this complex and info-filled, it’s easy to turn everything into an abstraction. When everybody is so busy, they end up assigning intellectual value to the things which are the most heavily guarded, i.e., inaccessible. In other words, “It feels bad to read Harper’s, therefore Harper’s must be an important smart magazine and I must be achieving something just by forcing myself to absorb it.”

What’s an intelligentsia? What’s it for? What’s the ultimate point in assigning things levels of intelligence and value instead of engaging with them? Why does it ruin a band for you if somebody dumb likes it? When does “cultural criticism” become identity politics or identity protection? When does “guarding” culture change into fighting culture? If you’re defending your culture from the rabble, it’s already dead.

Remember, kids: “Public morality requires public action.”

(All the Obama/unicorn paintings are by Dan Lacey, who sells them as posters on his blog.  I don’t personally know him; I just think they are cool.)

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Why try to choose between a werewolf and a vampire when you can just pick . . . ALL OF THEM, Y'ALL

Saw “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” recently and definitely have some thoughts.  First of all, it is a truth universally acknowledged that all boyfriends are either vampire boyfriends or werewolf boyfriends.  Some dudes might think that this maxim is facile, reducing bros in all of their wondrous complexity into mere binary objects.  To those dudes I say, welcome to life, white dudes.  Nobody cares about your complicated inner lives.  All anybody cares about is the inner life of the teenage girl, because it is the key to capitalist glory in These Troubling Economic Times.  Gross but true–our weird service economy depends on making everybody as insecure as teenage girls, so as to entice them into buying a bunch of crap they don’t need for their heads and bodies.  This is actually all Reagan’s fault, but that’s another topic (he’s a total werewolf boyfriend, in case you were wondering.)

Anyway, vampire boyfriends vs. werewolf boyfriends.  This dichotomy is so true I probably don’t even need to explain it, but here is an attempt.  Men attempt to mold their cool Masculine Identities around whatever crap they think will make them the most powerful.  If dudes are weak, they try to get smart and/or pick up lots of technical skills.  If dudes are strong, they try to get even stronger and more powerful, and also try to pick up lots of technical skills.  The technical skills are for when you have to make conversation with other dudes and you need a topic.  Dudes are important networking contacts for other dudes, because they may know women.

Vampire boyfriends are often neeerds who look like little girls in the face. This is why they are so obsessed with coolness.

Vampire boyfriends are often dudes who think they are smart.  Maybe they are smart nerds or smart Republicans or smart alts or smart/creepy poker-playing middle managers–it doesn’t really matter.  What matters is that these guys get off on control.  Their self-esteem is predicated upon mastery, and they get really pumped about having mastery of various things.  Since the universe is full of an semi-infinite amount of things, these dudes are understandably somewhat insecure, for most of them know that they cannot truly master everything.  Still, they care a lot about being better than other people, and that is an important fact to file away about these types.  Vampires are essentially reactive–even though they seem like they are all c0ol and powerful, they actually cannot function without the blood of lowly humans.  Vampires also only seem cool in comparison to humans–they’re really n0t very cool at all, if you compare them to sweet monsters like centaurs and Mothras.  Y0ur vampire boyfriend is only powerful in contexts where somebody gives a shit about his mastery.

Werewolf boyfriends, on the other hand, are wild and crazy guys.  These are the guys that show up at your window at two in the morning with a bunch of azaleas that they broke off the bush right outside said window, after which they proceed pick a fights with your neighbors and knock over things, under the (mistaken) assumption that this behavior is cool and romantic and Percy Bysshe Shelley-like.  These guys enjoy gambling, drinking, and ruining things.  They are full of spontaneity (i.e., weird emotions and trouble.)  You should not allow your werewolf boyfriend to drive a car or talk to your landlord.

You can tell Percy Bysshe Shelley is a werewolf boyfriend because he's flaunting some waxed chesticles.

Ultimately, neither werewolf boyfriends nor vampire boyfriends can be trusted.  Vampire boyfriends will take all your stuff, and werewolf boyfriends will break all your stuff.  In “New Moon,” Bella vacillates between freaking out because her vampire boyfriend is negging her all the time, and freaking out because her werewolf boyfriend is hanging out with sketchpads and running around in the rain all the time.  In the end, she chooses her vampire boyfriend, mostly because he threatens to kill himself if she doesn’t pay attention to him and do what he tells her to do.  This is a classic vampire boyfriend gambit.  Her werewolf boyfriend can only counter by threatening to withdraw his friendship, which isn’t a particularly equal counter-weight (werewolf boyfriends are not good at bargaining, because they are dumb.)  What we can take away from this saga is this:

Don’t hang out with werewolves.  Don’t hang out with vampires.  You should have been listening to your friend Anna Kendrick, who made fun of you so awesomely when you were mooning around over Edward and talking to weird motorcycle dudes.  Now Anna Kendrick is starring in movies that will probably be Oscar-nominated opposite George Clooney, while you’re stuck at some dumb Pope festival with a bunch of olds plus Dakota Fanning!  Bad move, y’all.

Better than you.

At the end of the day, if your friends tell you that you are acting crazy, you should probably listen to them instead of jumping off a cliff.  Just sayin’.

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This video was originally shown at a local Christmas pageant called Jinxmas to a live audience.

OK, here goes:

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In December, the world feels like a broken palace.  We wander the ruins at dusk, yanking out clumps of rye and talking about how there was once a garden here.  We trundle around in dirty voile dresses, talking about Miss Havisham and glass horses and headless cupids.  Down in the valley, the windows are glowing.  We can smell mushrooms, simmered in beef stock and butter, but we also smell crushed anise–something has passed by here, and broken the stalks.

To prepare escargot, you must first find a nest.  I don’t know how you will find it.  Perhaps you will find an outgrown garden, swollen with unplucked, wormbitten turnips, monstrous grey zucchini, soft carrots shrouded in curled shame by dry, crisp tops.  You will sit on a crumbling cinderblock, and you will watch, burying your cigarette butts beneath graveled hunks of soil.  If snails are capable of lurking, they’ll be lurking here.  What do snails do when they lurk?  They do what they always do, which is: snail around, and bite soft things, and make love to themselves.  Snails are incredibly creepy.  Their purpose in life is to increase snail-ness, by whatever means necessary.  Which means if you sit long enough, in a rotting forgotten garden, you will see a snail (after having lovingly snailed itself, perhaps over a period of hours) make a nest.

The nest will be filled with snails–perhaps fifty to a hundred.  The snail will dig the nest with its foot (which is also its whole body.)  The nest will be only a few centimeters deep.  Once the eggs are laid, the snail will cover them with soil, and then hie off, probably to go snail itself again.  Mark the spot with a stick, and visit it every week.  After a few weeks, the snails will emerge.  They will have spent their time in a typically snail-like fashion–eating their own egg shells, and then eating each other, in order to gain the strength to pull themselves from their graves into the wide world.  The great, wide world of snail food and snail friends and snail foes and general snailing opportunities.  The night was made for lovers, but also for snails, who are their own lovers.

The infant snails will be loathsome things–pale and clear and slimy, like discarded retainers.  Nonetheless, you must gather them up.  Force cold rough gloves onto your red stiff hands, and gather up these wriggling, transparent young snails.  You will wonder what is becoming of your life, and then you will put the snails in a box.  Preferably it is a wooden box, with holes drilled in it.  Add some soil to the box, and make sure there are worms in the soil (snails like to eat dirt, and worms like to eat dirt after snails have eaten it.)  Make sure the box is warm and wormy, damp and squirming, blind and questing.

What snails love best is a mixture of decayed matter and carrion, because they are the Devil’s own snails, but you must give them green things instead.  This is because snails will taste of whatever you feed them, and since you probably do not want to eat a mixture of decayed matter and carrion (I am assuming here that you are not a snail yourself), you must feed them beautiful and clean things.  The French like to feed them dill, or apples, or artichokes, or celeriac, or parsley, or cress, nettles, sorrel, roses, henbane, and yarrow.

You must keep your box of snails in the kitchen, that you might keep an eye on it.  Your warm, dark kitchen, from which the light fades by four in the afternoon, these days.  You must try not to sit in your warm, dark kitchen, sipping Carménère and staring at your box of snails.  This way lies madness.

The time will come for the snails to be purged.  If you do not purge the snails, you will have to eat whatever lies in their snaily stomachs, and so you must purge them.  The old method is simply to feed them nothing for a few weeks–for you to starve the snails, as they lurk in their little box, and drink wine to forget you are trapped in a dark kitchen with a bunch of creepy dying snails.  But nowadays we are more compassionate–we feed the snails cornmeal for a week, and then we make them fast for another.  They do not lose as much weight, this way.

After they are purged, you can boil your snails live.  Boil them for three minutes, or until they are dead.  Place them in a cool fresh brine, and then rinse them.

Your snails are ready for anything now, but I don’t care what you do with them.

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This is one of the best videos I’ve seen in a long time.  It reminds me of being a kid and trying to achieve subtle hair shading using crayons and screwing it up.  Also reminds me a bit of that movie “The Snowman” which all the teachers would haul out in December when they wanted to make little kids cry (as if that’s hard.)  Anyway, enjoy!

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Tomorrow, we’re doing Thanksgiving for eleven.  Two of the eleven can’t digest milk products, so we’re going dairy-free.  The below catalogues my tips and tricks for making turkey, stuffing, gravy, and mashed potatoes that cut the lactose without sacrificing flavor.  Most of these recipes can be easily adapted for vegan needs (except the turkey, obviously.)  Speaking of which . . .

DAIRY-PROOFING THE TURKEY:

Most recipes for roasted turkey have you rub it down with tons of herbed butter.  This is because herbed butter is awesome.  However, we can’t use it!  What to do?

Buying it:  Our first step was to purchase an Heritage turkey.  (Yes, I know I’ve advocated against serving turkey at all, but this year my hand was forced.)  Heritage turkeys are cool because they are not industrially bred, meaning they actually get to run around eating normal food and reproducing naturally and not being full of antibiotics.)  They’re turkeys like the Pilgrims ate.  Their other major advantage of getting one, beyond the fact it supports small farmers, sustainable agriculture, biodiversity, blah blah, is that Heritage turkeys are fattier than their industrial counterparts, which helps to mitigate the butter issue.  I’m not saying you’re screwed if you don’t get a Heritage turkey, but it can give you a small assist.  If you can’t get a Heritage bird, free-range turkeys are also unusually flavorful.

Royal Palm Heritage turkeys

Brining it: Another way to ensure that your turkey is moist is to brine it.  Cook’s Illustrated has a great guide to brining, and there are a million different turkey brining recipes out there, so I won’t belabor this point.  Suffice it to say that brining your turkey results in moister, more flavorful meat.  Brines are generally composed of this ratio: 1 cup kosher salt (don’t use table salt or it will be too salty!) to 1 gallon liquid.  The liquid could be water, stock, cider–basically any liquid (or combination of liquids) that you feel will impart awesome flavor.  Some cooks also add fresh or dried spices and “aromatics” to this mix.  Popular brining spices include whole peppercorns, whole allspice, rosemary, whole juniper berries, sage, thyme, chiles, sugar, oregano–anything that fits the flavor profile for the rest of the meal.  For aromatics–which are, by the way, just vegetables that happen to be high in flavor and aroma–you can’t go very far astray using staples such as onions, carrots, garlic, apples, celery, or ancho chiles.

You will probably need a couple gallons of brine, as well as a container to brine in.  A 5 gallon bucket works well.  Heat your brining liquids to a boil and add your salt (and sugar, if using.)  Stir until the salt and sugar is totally dissolved, and then cool to a cold temperature.  Put your fully thawed, innard-free turkey in a bucket, and pour the brine over it until it’s totally submerged, and refrigerate it.  You should brine it for a minimum of 4 hours and a maximum of 18.  Drain it by placing it uncovered in the refrigerator on a rack above a bunch of paper towels, and let it dry for at least 8 hours.

This sounds like a lot of fuss but it’s worth it–the resulting turkey is insanely juicy, even the breast.  When’s the last time your dad was carving the breast and rivulets of golden jus began leakily cascading across its crispy, bronzed skin and everybody got lusty and quiet and embarrassed?  You won’t miss the butter because you’ll be too mortified (and satisfied.)

Fig. 1: An Embarrassed Dad

Prepping it:  As referenced above, normally you would prep a turkey by rubbing it (inside, out, and under the skin) with an herbed butter mixture.  When using butter is not possible, there are a number of substitutes.    Don’t use margarine because it is filled with water and weird fillers and god knows what else.  This means that it won’t give you the buttery effect you’re after.  (One exception–Shedd’s Willow Run is the only vegan margarine I’ve ever had that’s worth a damn.  That’s because it’s really bad for you–it’s made of soybean oil and food coloring.  It’s just a bunch of saturated fat, which makes it work well in sauces and other applications.  No, I am not a shill for Shedd’s, although sometimes I wish I were, since Willow Run is no longer distributed at any of the grocery stores in my county anymore.  When Ross found out it would soon be unavailable, he went out and bought a million cases.  We’ve been using them for a year now, but I fear for the day on which we reach Peak Soybean Oil, as it were.)

Anyway, there are a number of butter substitutes.  Good quality lard, for instance.  Don’t be afraid of lard!  It’s rad, and you can use it with all the traditional Thanksgiving spices–sage, thyme, pepper, etc.  If you don’t want to use lard, try an oil.  Olive oil can be good if it goes with the rest of your turkey flavorings.  Italian-style turkey is not a bad thing.  To make your rub, try mixing it with marjoram, oregano, and rosemary.  Canola oil is inoffensive and adaptable and can be used as well.  You might try steeping it with fresh herbs in order to give it extra flavor.

Julia Child also recommends dropping your turkey on TV and laughing about it because you are so hardcore cool you can pull that crap off.

Once you’ve rubbed your turkey down, fill it with aromatics or stuffing as desired.  Here’s where things get wacky.  Julia Child recommends covering the turkey breast with strips of pancetta before trussing.  (Don’t use bacon unless you are okay with your turkey having a smoky flavor.)  The pancetta imparts vital pig fats!  It will make your turkey taste dark and exotic.  Ross tested the pancetta theory with a number of chickens, and the results were tasty.  We haven’t tried it on turkey yet, but this year we are venturing into the abyss!  If we ever come up, we’ll let you know if it worked.

Truss your turkey and roast.  America’s Test Kitchen recommends roasting at 400 for one hour, roasting at 250 for two hours, and then finishing it at 400.   The purpose behind the initial high roasting heat is to sear the meat–this sears the juices in.  (If stuffing your turkey, heat your stuffing until it reaches 130 degrees before putting it in the bird.  This keeps the stuffing from being in the “danger zone” during the low-roasting period.)  If you don’t know how to roast a turkey, find out more here.

NO-BUTTER STUFFING:

You probably think no-butter stuffing sounds obscene.  It can be, but it doesn’t have to be.  Everybody has a different stuffing recipe.  We’re making cornbread and sausage stuffing.

Making the stuffing:

I like this recipe from Bon Appetit.  Here is a dairy-free adaptation.  Instead of buttermilk, I used a mixture of coconut yogurt and coconut milk.  Coconut milk provides the necessary body and fattiness, while the coconut yogurt provides the tang and lactic acid of the buttermilk (at least as much as is possible.)  Don’t be scared to use coconut milk–the coconut-y tang is barely detectable in the finished cornbread, and it can even enhance spicier stuffing preparations.

Coconut milk substitute

If you’d like to make this recipe vegan, you can try substituting 3 tablespoons coconut milk and 1 tablespoon oil for each egg.  Some cooks use 2 tablespoons applesauce to substitute for each egg, but you may not want the resulting sweet notes in your stuffing, so CONSIDER CAREFULLY Y’ALL BEFORE COMMITTING Y’ALL.  Also, this is kind of good with cut up scallions in it.

No-Buttermilk Cornbread (serves 10)

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted Willow Run margarine OR 1/2 cup canola oil
• 1/2 cup coconut yogurt (made from coconut milk and available at most health food stores) mixed with 1 cup coconut milk
• 2 large eggs
• 2 cups yellow cornmeal
• 1 cup unbleached all purpose flour
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

Preheat oven to 400°F.  Oil a 13×9x2-inch metal baking pan.  Whisk together margarine or oil, coconut yogurt, coconut milk, then eggs.  Mix the remaining dry ingredients in large bowl, then stir in the milky mixture.  Transfer to prepared pan.

Bake corn bread until edges are lightly browned and tester inserted into center comes out clean, about 20 minutes. Cool completely in pan. If using in stuffing, cover tightly and store at room temperature at least 1 day and up to 2 days.  (Note: you have to wait that long.  You can even make your stuffing the day-of.  Just tear it into bite-size pieces, spread in a single layer on some baking sheets, and bake at 250 for an hour.  That will dry it right out.)

You can use this in any cornbread stuffing recipe.  I like Emeril’s Southern take on it, as well as this Bon Appetit fruit-based dressing and this very Yankee oyster cornbread stuffing from Charlie Palmer.  Just remember the following tips:

• Substitute tasty oils or lard for butter
• Remember the egg substitution rules
• Don’t be afraid to pour in lots of turkey drippings for added flavor
• Sausage, bacon, or any pig derivative can cover a multitude of sins
• If you want to make these recipes vegan, substitute mushrooms or nuts in place of meat.  They’re still savory morsels, after all.  Vegetable stock can always be substituted for chicken/turkey stock, but homemade stock will taste much better than packaged.  Another interesting option is to make a seaweed-based stock, or one based around shiitake mushrooms.  There are some good ideas for this here.

Tomorrow, we’ll take on gravy and mashed potatoes.  If you have any other tips or tricks, please share them below.

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Egon Schiele, Blinde Mutter oder Die Mutter

Schiele’s figures have real weight and awkwardness, which makes the grace they attain seem painfully earned.  The mother figure here looks both real and carved out of marble at the same time.  The murky interior suggests cliffs and stones as well as soot and dust–it manages to be both abstract and tactile.

Gustav Klimt, Die Freundinnen

Klimt uses very flat planes, filling them with intricate patterns and bolts of color.  His work is reminiscent of Japanese prints.  This flattened, print-like affect makes his subjects seem all the more vivid, like a vase of orchids posed in front of floral wallpaper.  The wallpaper doesn’t become ugly, but the orchids do become more beautiful.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street Scene: Berlin

Kirchner’s figures are having some facial expressions, having some fashion, being somewhere cool, getting confused by hats.  What makes this painting cool is that it captures a very transitory moment–that of walking around at night looking at things, when way too  many things seem to be happening and the lighting keeps changing and horses look askew at you.  It’s difficult to suggest movement and transience in a static object, but Kirchner achieves it.

But I needed to make a poster, not depict the tension between the natural and artificial as society assimilated the effects of the Industrial Revolution.  So I started looking at the Belle Epoque advertising for events, spirits, products–anything I thought might be vaguely appropriate.

When most people think of cabaret posters, they of course think of Toulouse-Lautrec.  But there were a lot of other great artists working in the poster metier during this time.  Some of the most interesting posters were absinthe advertisements.  Here are a few of my favorites:

Ad for Absinthe Parisienne, by P. Gélis-Didot and Louis Malteste

“You should drink our absinthe, because it might inspire old Pilgrims to chase you!”

Ad for Absinthe Bourgeois, by the Mourgue brothers

“Instead of giving your cat coffee to drink as he peruses the morning paper, why not offer him absinthe?”

Ad for J. Edouard Pernot absinthe, by Leonetto Cappiello

“Our absinthe is the perfect accessory for rapey dudes.”

Leonetto Cappiello is widely regarded as the father of modern advertising.  His lines are very clean; his images bright and distinctive.  When it came time to design the main Music for Moderns poster, I decided to base it on a famous Cappiello image–another advertisement for absinthe:

Ad for Absinthe Ducros Fils, by Leonetto Cappiello

The thing I liked best about this image was the look of ecstasy on this woman’s face.  She’s fully clothed–even gloved–but she manages to look sexy, joyous, and vulnerable.  There’s something almost subversive about the look of unadulterated pleasure on her face.  This look spoke to our hopes for the event–we wanted to create something that felt dangerous yet prim, fun but buttoned-up.  After playing with the image for a bit, I came up with the below:

As you can see, I lifted Cappiello’s central image and color scheme whole hog.  In order to remove the original writing and get it to a higher resolution, I had to process the image multiple times in both Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.  The lines of the resulting image is somewhat simpler and less nuanced than the original, but Cappiello’s strong color palette still carries it.  The most difficult thing about making this poster was fitting all the necessary information onto it.  In order to do so, I ended up using 17 different fonts, in the hopes of differentiating each block of information from the next in an aesthetically pleasing manner.  I was also hoping to replicate the lettering of vaudeville posters like the below:

While this poster contains a huge amount of information, it manages to stay attractive and visually interesting through its lettering differentiations.  Each line is justified in order to achieve visual unity.  It may be a relic of a more literate time, but the effect is still appealing.

My next task was to create tickets.  In the process of searching for a ticket template, I came across some really cool luggage labels.  Here are a few of the best:

Images credit: Tom Schifanella, via DarkRoastedBlend.com

I was most intrigued by some of this set of Richter & Co. luggage labels.  My two favorite images ended up being these:

I settled upon adapting the Grand Hotel de Londres label.  Here is the final result:

On the back, I wanted to include some of the hilarious nightclub rules I had found when researching Prohibition nightlife.  Some clubs still use rules like this today.  Milk & Honey’s are especially representative:

No name-dropping, no star fucking.

1. No name-dropping, no star fucking.
2. No hooting, hollering, shouting or other loud behaviour.
3. No fighting, play fighting, no talking about fighting.
4. Gentlemen will remove their hats. Hooks are provided.
5. Gentlemen will not introduce themselves to ladies.
   Ladies, feel free to start a conversation or ask the bartender to introduce you. If a man you don’t know speaks to you, please lift your chin slightly and ignore him.
6. Do not linger outside the front door.
7. Do not bring anyone unless you would leave that person alone in your home. You are responsible for the behaviour of your guests.
8. Exit the bar briskly and silently. People are trying to sleep across the street. Please make all your travel plans and say all farewells before leaving the bar.

Here is what I settled upon.  The rules are taken from those for Club Gallant, a notorious New York club popular in 1925:

The rules, which you probably can’t read unless you are magic, are these:

1.  Do not get too friendly with the waiter.  His name is neither Charlie nor George.  Remember the old adage about familiarity breeding contempt.

2.  Do not ask to play the drums.  The drum heads are not as tough as many another head.  Besides, it has a tendency to disturb the rhythm.

3.  Make no requests of the leader of the orchestra for songs of the vintage 1890.  Crooning “Sweet Adeline” was all right for your granddad, but times, alas, have changed.

4.  Please do not offer to escort the cloakroom girl home.  Her husband, who is an ex-prizefighter, is there for that purpose.

The funny thing is, all of these rules, while tongue-in-cheek, are TOTALLY APPLICABLE to jerks of today.

My next task was creating hand bills.  Hand bills are fun to make because they are totally disposable–they cost little, and people don’t take them terribly seriously.  My first handbill was a just a play on the poster.  I needed to fit a ton of information into a tiny space, so I tried to come up with a concept to tie it together.  I liked the idea of the Music for Moderns muse drowning in a sea of words, but still smiling as she held her champagne high above the waves.  The execution, however, didn’t quite come out the way I wanted it to:

Warping the text into waves was harder than it looked, and finding words to fill every necessary space was challenging as well (I’m still not happy with that tiny “beer” hiding near the bottom of her dress.)  I had more fun with my next attempts.  I kept searching through archives of Belle Epoque advertisements, looking for images that were suggestive of refined debauchery.  To that end, I concentrated my searches on alcohol, cigarette, lingerie, and night club advertisements.  Finally,  I found this image:

Ad for Cigarrillos Paris, by Aleardo Villa. Scan courtesy Revolution Apparel.

What I liked about this image was its sense of insolent repose.  Sure, it glamorizes smoking, but it also glamorizes wearing purple dresses, living near the ocean, hanging out in pansy fields, and being hot.  If my hand bill actually tricks a bunch of youth into doing any of those activities, I can’t say I’ll be sorry.  (A promise I can make confidently, since I’m entirely sure that it won’t.  Besides, there are worse things to be than a propagandist for indolent lifestyles.)  Anyway, here it is:

I also enjoyed a series of advertisements for a dance troupe called Bon Ton Burlesque.  I couldn’t find out who had originally done the posters (which date back to the 1890s), but I thought that it was some of the best branding that I’d ever seen.  The design elements are kept consistent, and the images find a weird balance between salaciousness and whimsy:

The guy with the monocle is the best. He is SO SCANDALIZED and SO INTRIGUED.

And here is the monocle dude again, playing the fool. I hope that the other dandies don't find out!

Wee pups

It’s hard to see, but the dancer is leading around some of the same guys from the other posters: Monocle Dude, Eager Fatty, Muttonchops, Old Beardy, and John McCain.  There are so many reasons to love these posters–one, because they are like reading a comic about horrible old rich dudes really slowly; two, because they tell the truth.  Unlike a lot of modern advertisements for “sexy” products, these don’t pretend that consumers of these products are virile studs.  If you are a dude who is going out to see strippers all the time, you are probably a goofy dude of limited attractiveness.  The strippers in question will probably make total fools of you, and in your lust you will look stupid, and everybody will laugh.  Instead of trying to hide this grim reality, the Bon Ton ads make it a selling point.  The question they pose is, “Don’t you feel like going out and acting like an idiot and being humiliated by pretty girls?  Of course you do, you worthless sot.”  These images elevate the pathetic, helping it achieve a strange kind of transcendent beauty.  These posters are full of good humor and geniality.  Although they are over a hundred years old, they are more progressive in their politics than most sex worker/sex product advertisements today.  The dignity of the women in these posters is in no way damaged by their calling; on the contrary, it empowers them, allowing them to control the rich old white men who ostensibly control their entire society.  In short, why are these posters so Third Wave?  I don’t know.  They might be so good as to be Fourth Wave, in my opinion.

Here is my Bon Ton hand bill:

And herein ends my Music for Moderns graphic design post.  My main purpose in writing this post was to credit all of the amazing artists whose images I “borrowed.”  Although it was legal for me to use these images, since they are no longer covered by copyright, I feel that attribution is important.  I also just think that these artists are awesome, as well as much of the artistic output of the Belle Epoque in general.  I think that anybody who cares about graphic design should check out some of this work.  In the early days of advertising, care was taken to make even everyday objects, like luggage labels, as beautiful as possible.  Just because advertising is evil doesn’t mean it has to be ugly.  (I’m looking at you, Golden Arches.)

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