Creature Comforts Redux

This can't be good.

This planned TV series is inspired by the video I linked to in my Bug Eyed post. I guess it could be alright, but I fear it will get all prettied up and Disney-fied. How could it be as good without the British accents? I ask you.

Drifting Along...

As I came up the Lexington ramp from 94E this evening, I glimpsed something moving into the road and braked slightly. It was a tumbleweed. It did not pause, but kept rolling south.

I spent part of my evening discussing cultural hegemony with a Spanish ex-patriate living in the TC. (I'm going to start using the initials in the same way the kids do for "The O.C."-- i.e. "I brake for tumbleweeds ... that's how we roll in the TC.") He allowed that Europeans are just as racist and reactionary as Americans and was generously dismissive about that whole "freedom fries" thing. Europeans act the same way, he said.

I choose to be comforted by our sameness; we are all dumb-asses together.

Tea With the Ladies

To prove that the bone-crushing cold has not, in fact, made us feral, we put on our fancy duds and sashayed over to The Saint Paul Hotel for high tea last Saturday. It was the "chocolate lovers" tea and did not disappoint in that department.

The menu included five courses.


I wore my new reading glasses, because ladies who drink tea have reading glasses, ya know.


By the fourth course, we were starting to feel the effects.

Not wanting to waste a perfectly good sugar buzz, we repaired to the bar at the St. Paul Grill and let down our hair, so to speak.

Eventually, we even had dinner across the street at Pazzaluna. A lovely time and a great way to shake off the cold. Thanks ladies!

**Photos courtesy of Fiffy's cute new camera. Thanks Fiffy!

Tape Love

All this talk of a mix CD (thanks for all the suggestions, you guys -- you're amazing!) made me nostalgic for my rather too-abundant collection of mix tapes. I can't bring myself to get rid of many of them. I weeded out most of the straight recording-of-an-album-to-tape tapes a while ago, but even had to retain some of those. I'm mean I could buy a CD version of Wilson Pickett's Greatest Hits, but it wouldn't have those choice Professor Longhair tunes stuck on end like the tape James made for me.

But the real treasures are the mix tapes made for me by friends, especially Al. He has a gift for mixing songs, and most of the tapes he made for me became the correct context for those songs in my head. Of COURSE, "Somewhere Where Love Can't Find Me" by Marshall Crenshaw should be followed by "She Don't Love Nobody" by Nick Lowe and Tom Petty's "Feel a Whole Lot Better" on that collection of covers he made. And I always felt like that place (on the other side of the same tape!) where "Hog Tied Over You" by Tennessee Ernie Ford and Ella Mae Morse segued into "I Call Your Name" by Johnny Clegg was a revelation. Could there be some genetic connection between American hillbillies and white South Africans?

Sometimes the tape covers were super cool:

This one had Billie Holiday on one side and Michelle Shocked on the other. He created this design with paper images and scotch tape in a way I have not been able to duplicate. It was a multi-layered design, on both the case and the tape itself:

God, I love that. Here's another Al artifact:

It was Tracy Chapman on one side and the Talking Heads' Naked on the other. It stills makes me laugh. Possibly because I'm a dork. I'm listening to Naked now, and rediscovering how much I love "(Nothing But) Flowers": "If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawn mower!"

So good.

Crooooooooning

OK, so I want to make a compilation CD of songs that have great ooooo oooo vocals. I often find the singing of the long U sound quite compelling. This is what I've come up with so far:

1. Smokestack Lightnin' by Howlin' Wolf (really lives up to his name on that one)
2. My Favorite Mistake by Sheryl Crow (repeated Oooooos in the lead in)
3. Up on Cripple Creek by The Band (on the bridge -- a cross between ooooooing and yodeling)
4. Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon (more howling, natch)
5. At my Window Sad and Lonely by Wilco (and Billy Bragg? off Mermaid Ave.)

So what am I missing? Any suggestions? What other songs can give me the crooooooning I crave?

UPDATE: I thought of another one:

6. Doowutchyalike by Digital Underground ("oo ooo I see guys an' girls dancin'")

Bug Eyed

My eyes are giving me fits these days--can't see past five feet with my glasses, can't see close up with my contacts. Rather than jumping right into bifocals, I'm trying an interim solution: pairing my contacts with a pair of those magnifying reading glasses you can get at the drugstore. They make me think of the koala bear in Creature Comforts:

Anthony Bourdain: Pearl Clutcher

Anthony Bourdain thinks Food Network is pandering to hoi polloi. (Thanks elbee, for sending the link.)

He and I have come down on the same side of the coin on several issues (if by issues, I mean Sandra Lee) but he is much meaner about the whole thing. At least, I hope I wasn't that mean. And he addresses the trend discussed in the New Yorker article--the network's moving away from using classically trained chefs to more personalities who cook, such as Rachel Ray, Lee, and Paula Deen. I, in general, applaud this trend. I'm just not fond of some of the personalities they've chosen.

Bourdain gets all uppity about the shunting aside of the chefs and does some hand-wringing about how Mario Batali and Bobby Flay are treated. Gimme a break. Like somehow focusing on what will help home cooks is necessarily pandering to the lowest common denominator or something. He refers to Bobby Flay's show Throwdown, in which Flay is regularly beaten when challenging an amateur cook at his or her specialty. Indeed, Flay was in St. Paul last year, competing with the guy who runs Izzy's ice cream parlour--they each had to create a new flavor. (In a lovely not-everybody-has-cable moment, the Izzy's guy did not know who Flay was.)

Here's Bourdain on the whole concept: "Now…does ANYONE actually believe that Bobby Flay can’t make a better chili than a supermarket ground beef bearing amateur?" I believe that the amateur could make a chili that someone besides Bourdain would think was better--not everybody has your overwhelmingly sensitive palate, Tony. He mentions how Emeril and Flay are good chefs who run good restaurants, as though that's relevant to whether they'd make for good television or whether they'd be useful to the viewers. It's called the Food Network, not the Chef Network.

He also seems to believe that these chefs are being humiliated against their will. Bourdain on Batali: "Is there any more egregiously under-used, criminally mishandled, dismissively treated chef on television?" I think the key words there are "on television." He's one of very few, and there's no evidence to suggest he's shackled to his cutting board.

A trained chef doesn't necessarily make a great cooking-show host, nor does haute cuisine appeal to everybody. Imagine my presumption at liking shows with accessible hosts that are about simple-to-prepare meals with easy-to-find ingredients. Excuse me while I put down this ham sandwich and go find some foie gras.

Oy, do I appear to be unhealthily obsessed with food TV? I'm putting a moratorium on this topic for a while.