Apr
13
History: Teen People, 1998
April 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Yesterday Pajiba ran a column on Elijah Wood by contributor Michael Murray. He tries to put a finger on what’s so fascinating about Wood, and describes what I agree is the most memorable scene in Deep Impact:
As a tsunami is about to wash over the world, Wood — mobile and courageous on a zippy dirt bike — dekes in and out of the doomed motorists jammed on the highway.
My dad hates Elijah Wood and has since Wood starred as the kid in the updated Flipper movie. But I loved that movie (and still do: the statute of limitations on childhood taste has not run out), and countless others he made in the ’90s starting with Radio Flyer.
Deep Impact continued a fundamental shift in my taste. 1997 had come and gone with Titanic, which my friends and I liked a lot . . . then some of those friends saw it twenty times, while others decided a month later that they hated it. The combination of schizo obsession and backlash seemed even more ridiculous after the release of Armageddon, one of the biggest waste-of-time pieces of tripe I’ve ever endured, but for some reason people LOVED it and hated Deep Impact. I began to think about how this quieter, box-office-failing movie was better regardless of its level of commercial success. That’s not to say I didn’t continue to see questionable things and often do now.* But I started to understand the relationship between good movies and entertaining movies and their overlap.
It’s hard to explain the place Wood holds in my pop-culture memory because you just had to be there. In a way, our whole generation grew up on the same trajectory, and I’d seen him in movies from childhood to adolescence and onward, playing various parts that felt really truthful even though they spanned different historical periods, different backgrounds. I flipped through the December/January issue of Teen People — a teen magazine so honestly good I asked to get a subscription — and saw this spread on Elijah Wood:
For some reason, this magazine spread is one of my strongest sense memories to this day: I remembered this exact photo (and spent a lot of mental energy finding it online), the colors of the title font, how the shirt he’s wearing is blue because you see it on the next page. I was listening to a CD I’d just received for my birthday — 1996′s Yourself or Someone Like You by Matchbox 20, one of my first favorite CDs and one I still love for its importance to me then — and one of those songs is embedded in the memory too. The CD rode a continuous wave of successful singles and sold millions and millions of copies. I can’t listen to this album without thinking of this story on Elijah Wood in this magazine, and I can’t think of Elijah Wood without thinking of this album.
There’s some mental coin flip where this particular moment on this particular day won the memory game: An actor I like but don’t love, in a fairly typical photo spread, for an embarrassing movie (The Faculty!), sitting in my room, looking out the window into town, listening to a fairly typical mid 90s pop rock group. I feel a connection to Elijah Wood because of it, and I still think he’s great even though I fell asleep during each installment of Lord of the Rings.
* Here’s a clause to strike fear in your heart: Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D.
Apr
12
News: Rates of infla-seball
April 12, 2010 | 2 Comments
The latest This American Life details the seemingly nefarious dealings of one investment firm before and during the bursting housing bubble and subsequent recession. Most of the way in, the show guts you with a complex capitalist issue that does not bear out an easy answer.
I love moral gray areas as a general rule, which is almost a statement not worth making: Almost all moral issues are gray in our real everyday lives. (I also love air, whiling away the hours, weather, and waking up every morning.) In this case we are asked to decide: If you are in the business of making money for your investors, and you do that by exploiting a legal weakness of the accepted system, is it wrong?
Moreover: If exploiting that weakness breaks the bubble’s back and throws our country into turmoil that will last for years, is it any more or less wrong?
I realized what this episode reminded me of while texting with my dad about the Chicago Cubs. As a White Sox family, we dislike the Cubs; as a north sider dealing with Cubs traffic and the Cubs’ awful, awful fan base, I am not sympathetic. One night last year, drunken Cubs fans crowded around the Clark bus I was riding home, like shambling zombies in a Stephen King-ocalypse. They start drinking at 9 a.m. and finish at the end of the baseball season.
But fan base aside, because I’m not here to get all argumentum ad hominem.
According to Forbes, the Cubs are the fifth-most valuable franchise in Major League Baseball at $726m — about 45% of the formula-busting New York Yankees at $1.6b.
Yet the Cubs have the most expensive average ticket price in baseball, despite last year’s sub-.500 season. The Yankees are only the third-most expensive average even with their $1.6b franchise value.
As the experts on This American Life pointed out about the investment firm, can you fault an organization for making money for its investors? In the case of the Cubs, when people will lay down absurd money to attend the games, buy merchandise, and carouse at the local restaurants and bars, can anyone blame the higher-ups for charging as much as possible?
Baseball is a business like any other, and if the goal is to put butts in the seats, the Cubs are a succes fou regardless of the team they put out in any given season. Foolhardily signing long-term deals with players who self-destruct as soon as the cap is back on the pen is a symptom of really, really poor judgment in the management. It also shows that the Cubs don’t value return-on-investment for fans who pay more than any other fans nationwide do to see their team.
Apr
10
News: Excedrin and the great rebranding hoopla
April 10, 2010 | Leave a Comment
First a disclaimer: I love Excedrin, rely on it frequently to kill my headaches dead, and recommend it to people.
That said, a few months ago I started to notice something. Extra Strength Excedrin was on sale two for one while my favorite Excedrin Migraine wasn’t, and I thought, you know, if they’re close enough I can buy Extra Strength. Let’s compare some of the Excedrin family of products:
I’m sure other pain reliever brands do the same thing, but for Excedrin it’s particularly funny since their model includes three separate ingredients: the acetaminophen, aspirin, and caffeine in a particular combination.
Apr
5
Overheard: The currency of argument
April 5, 2010 | Leave a Comment
The NYT’s “The Caucus” blog ran a post on Sarah Palin’s discomfort-inspiring endorsement of John McCain in a state primary where he is being brutalized from the right. I hate John McCain for bringing Palin to anyone’s attention in the first place and can never forgive him, but the photo of him standing beside (yet several feet away from) Palin is painful. She is, of course, wearing her scary structured black leather jacket that seems to come from the Dominatrix Lair line of Chanel. He looks as though he has been holding his breath for the last hour, or year and a half.
Anyway, this doesn’t draw out more than the typical level of outrage for me, but one of the reader comments explained my thoughts better than I’ve managed to before now:
Maybe as Republicans keep moving further and further into the past we’ll finally return to a time when the currency of argument was reason rather than emotion and symbolism.
Yesterday on Speaking of Faith, Krista Tippett hosted two Jesuit priests who are celebrated scientists: Brother Guy Consolmagno and Father George Coyne. They discussed extensively the gaps in our understanding of the universe, and how those gaps are something to celebrate, to pursue without ceasing.
They also quoted the Anne Lamott line that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. The certainty of today’s most abusive and relentless right-wingers is their most offensive trait among many.
Mar
17
News: New cat matches furniture
March 17, 2010 | 1 Comment
My parents adopted a new cat, Sophie, from one of our country’s many kill shelters. She is precious and seems destined to be counterpart to existing family cat Claude. These two pictures make me think of the Simon & Garfunkel lyric “Old friends sat on their park bench like bookends”:
Sophie, whom I’ve jokingly called Sofa because of her frequent naps, is very dark gray and tends to blend in with the decor at my parents’ house. She also matches with Claude. Putting the “animal” in Garanimals!*
* Dumb joke.
Mar
8
Food: Brownies above reason
March 8, 2010 | 1 Comment
Have you ever seen those “Two Bite Treats” at the grocery store? Since they’re small but made of the same stuff as the less catchy Regular Sized Treats, I typically brought them home, ate multiples, and felt the same as I would have with a double chocolate cupcake or something.
This “lower fat, low sugar AMAZING vegan brownies recipe” from the Frugal Vegan caught my eye because it is so, so simple. I omitted the chocolate chips, swapped the regular flour for whole wheat, and baked the batter in a straight-sided round metal pan since that’s all I have.
Once it cooled, I used a 2″ish circle cookie cutter to make about 18 rounds. Then I mixed up a little bit of frosting:
1T Earth Balance
2T Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese
1T creamy peanut butter
1t vanilla
1/4 to 1/3C powdered sugar
1t cocoa powder
If it’s too thick, thin it with a little bit of almond or soy milk or whatever. Distribute it evenly among the rounds. I used it judiciously and had some leftover afterward, then I added some sprinkles for some additional cheer. But really, the only cheer I need is that each of these frosted brownie rounds has only 1 Weight Watchers point. (If you eat 2, it’s 3 points total.)
If you were a forward thinker, you would do this: Save the scraps after cutting the rounds, mash them up with the leftover frosting or some ready-made stuff, and make cake balls. Then dip them in chocolate or whatever, you can get all fancy with the help of this great Pioneer Woman post on cake balls.
Feb
8
News: Opioids and lag time
February 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Your heroine has been recovering from a surgical procedure for the better part of a week. I’ll be back with regularity soon, because I figured a chronicle of all the daytime TV, medications, and naps would be too much for you all to handle.
Jan
25
Early: a definition
January 25, 2010 | Leave a Comment
In a city of millions of people, I am always surprised by how un-crowded many places are, how entire times of day are so empty as to feel completely private. In a city of millions of people, there is frequently no line at the grocery store; my prescription can be ready in five minutes; I can drive from here to downtown in about ten. I am the first and only car at the red light, with no one waiting to drive through the intersection on the perpendicular street.
In the suburbs this feeling only intensifies, fewer people per square mile and more whole areas made up of stores without any residential. Where the city feels peaceful during the empty times, the suburbs feel a little bit alarming, desolate. Instead of enjoying having everything to yourself, you wonder why no one else is there.
But I love the stolen time, the feeling of accomplishment. Completing tasks in less time with no lines or traffic; freedom to look around and think. As it starts to turn light on these short January days, I watch the streetlights switch off in the blooming near-sunlight.
Jan
25
News: Dumpy Brit hates fashion
January 25, 2010 | Leave a Comment
On Friday my tutee and I went over the word “refuted.” I realized I got into too much detail and nuance when describing the words to him, which I can’t help, but refute was especially tricky.
“So you argue for something?” he said.
“No, not really. You argue against something someone else said, and back up your point,” I said. “So, yeah, you do kinda argue for something, but only because you’re proving something else wrong.”
We used it in a sentence, which I think was about the President and the Senate. Then real life presented me with a much better example. Tanya Gold wrote a regrettably stupid, bitter-sounding piece on why fashion is the worst, including — no, really — blaming high heels for a sixteen year old’s fatal fall between subway cars. In it, she makes a lot of straw-man arguments about thinness and unhappiness and blah blah blah.
One of the first commenters on the post swiftly refutes Gold’s claims. But the best answer came from Tavi of style rookie, who shoots the straw men down with one sentence:
What Tanya Gold and many others, including myself, hate is the everyone-has-to-look-the-same-and-also-sexy philosophy, which is NOT fashion.
Plenty of people have enormous style that isn’t tied to any era, any designer. To imbue your appearance with verve and personality has nothing to do with thinness OR sexiness unless you want it to. And to completely give up on your appearance, as it seems Gold has, isn’t making any statement against fashion. Most everyday people don’t participate in fashion, and even those who follow it don’t necessarily buy or wear any designer fashion at any point. She mentions feeling nauseous or something when she passes the Banana Republic, which is one of the classiest and most classic chains around and which has only occasional ties to trend.
I think Tanya Gold actually hates clothes that fit properly, and where that comes from I can’t say. Listen, friend Tanya. I am 5’11″ and 200 pounds, several standard deviations away from the average, and I diligently rifle through LOTS of wrong things before coming up with a right thing. And yes, on those days when I dress like a bum, I know that’s what I’m doing. In other words, here’s a quarter: Take your frumpadump “I hate fashion, t-shirts and broomstick skirts forever!” and call someone who cares.
Jan
20
Sad news.
January 20, 2010 | 4 Comments
My sweet, precious little cat was put to sleep on Monday because of a giant, growing, inoperable mass in her throat. She got very sick over the last few months and she started to suffer a great deal as the tumor obstructed her breathing and eating, which made this the only humane and decent thing to do. She was 7. I loved her so much, and I am so, so sad.
