On the Road Again

To the land of popped collars, loafers without socks, and G&Ts on the porch at sunset. Report to come next week.

 

Perks

As you all know, the editors of Always Double Back are real-life editors as well. The Squirrel nibbles away mostly at dry, academic tomes while the Puffin gets the sexier jobs like novels and other fun trade books. He also has semi-regular gigs at two well-known magazines, Upscale Manmag and Upscale Ladymag. Magazines are inundated with all sorts of free products that publicists hope will be reviewed or otherwise editorially featured; most of these items end up in the frayed messenger bags of the underpaid editorial staff. Will often brings home things from Manmag’s giveaway pile that none of the other people want, usually books. I’ve been pestering for a while for him to swipe some stuff from Ladymag as well, but didn’t really expect much due to what I’m sure is fierce protectiveness from the alpha-kitty staffers there. But this week he managed to pilfer the following pile of treats over the course of an afternoon:

This isn’t even all of it, just what I plan to use. I won’t need to buy any cosmetic or skin-care stuff for at least a year. That little blue bottle was the real score, seeing as it retails for my entire annual skin-care budget. For what it costs, it had better be made with unicorn milk or something.

 

Tasty Sunday Dinner

I was proud of myself for getting up early yesterday and riding my bike up to the greenmarket by 8:30 am. I was there in time to score a lovely bunch of ramps, among other things. I knew I needed to put them to good use, seeing as I paid $8 for half a pound of this springtime delicacy. I remembered seeing a recipe for lemon chicken on Simply Recipes (one of my favorite recipe sites) that would make a nice, spring-y anchor for the meal and use up the organic chicken thighs I’d just purchased. Tonight’s dinner ended up thus:

On the side I made some farro and smothered it with the ramps, shallots (also from the greenmarket), mushrooms, and grape tomatoes sauteed in a little bit of butter and olive oil, sprinkled with salt and pepper. It’s best to keep things simple with ingredients like this. We washed it all down with a bottle of vinho verde from Trader Joe’s, a tremendous bargain at $3.99 per bottle. If any of my ten readers have access to ramps, run out and buy some immediately, as they’ll be out of season in the next week or two. The price is steep, but worth it.

 

My Cat Is Too Cute

He turned 14 last month–still pretty rock-n-roll for an old man…

 

Questions and Answers

The past week or so has seen the visitation of the brother and then a bit of a wind-down of much-needed solitude. Of the many events and sights I/we visited, the highlights (two films and a play) were each characterized by Q&A sessions. I’ve never quite gotten on board with these things–I think it’s cool that directors/actors/writers get up there to go into a little more detail about their work, but the people ask the dumbest questions. Or worse, they don’t ask questions at all, but rather use the forum to air information about themselves, creating an awkward silence in their wake.

The first (and most painful) of these was a Tribeca Film Festival screening of Fighter, a fairly low-budget Danish version of Karate Kid (Turkish girl overcomes gender/social/cultural obstacles to become kung-fu fighter, wins respect of glowering bully and love of cute blond boy). The film was fine, not great; the director, one of the lead actors, and this old-school kung-fu master guy were there for the Q&A and gamely fielded statements about audience members’ experiences in Copenhagen, opinions about the “Turkish diaspora” in northern Europe, and a request for the actor to do a back flip (he politely declined).

A few days later we took in the premiere of Finding Amanda, which was hilarious (catch it if it comes to your town) and again sat through a stiff Q&A with the writer/director Peter Tolan and stars Brittany Snow and Matthew Broderick. They all seemed pretty unwilling to answer questions at all, and the death blow was dealt by the guy who asked poor Mr. Broderick what was the worst thing he’d ever read about himself in “the trades.”

Then, the other day as I was quietly enjoying a freshly empty house (brother sent home, Will in Princeton), I received an unexpected last-minute invitation to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s new production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, starring John Turturro and, of all people, Elaine Stritch. The play was as hilarious and sad as I expected, but then the dreaded Q&A began. The best part, I think, was when someone asked Ms. Stritch about how she prepared for the “physicality” of her role. [For those unfamiliar with the play, she played Hamm's--John Turturro's character--mother, who, along with her husband, Nagg, lives in a garbage can.] She tartly replied that there wasn’t much preparation needed for moving around inside an ashcan on one’s stumps. Okay, then! I really think that these little extras would be best presented as panel-type discussions among the players/producers that the audience can just watch and enjoy, like a DVD extra. We can’t be trusted to ask interesting or intelligent questions, it seems.

 

That’s One Way to Recycle…

I generally ignore the Thursday Home & Garden section of the Times–I have an appreciation of good interior design, but when it comes to my own home, “decorating” means straightening the magazines on the coffee table and hanging a few pictures. But today this photo caught my eye:

This is from some designer showcase thing happening on the Upper East Side. At first I thought it was some wacky retro wallpaper (you children of the 70s will surely remember the shiny wallpaper that sometimes showed up in bathrooms), but then realized it’s the tops of tin cans. Creative! Of course, the acoustics must be dreadful, and woe betide anyone who leans up against that wall, but still. It’s cool to see something so DIY make it into a show house that’s probably otherwise filled with prohibitively expensive “premium” materials.

 

Busy busy

I’ve tried to avoid the lame round-ups lately, but things have gotten quite busy, so…

Eating: We went to a seder the other night with our friend Seth’s (the one who gave us the Fergus Henderson book) family. The food–huge amounts of chopped chicken liver, pickled herring, salmon, matzo ball soup, brisket, chicken, potato kugel, etc.–was fantastic and I was so full that I actually had trouble walking. Then last night we went to another dinner party with a much more spa-like menu of swordfish steaks, couscous, and mango salsa, finished with apple pie. As a result of all this, the running program has been stepped up a bit.

Reading: It’s allll work right now, and none of it very interesting.

Family: It’s crunch time, as I get the work projects out of the way to get ready for my brother’s visit later this week and early next. There will be some Watching during this time, as we take in a few screenings of the Tribeca Film Festival.

Listening: For the past week I’ve been obsessed with In a Cave, the new album from Elf Power, whom we saw perform a few weeks ago. I’m also wearing out Me and You, Snowglobe’s recent-ish compilation of odds and ends. Those guys have a *lot* of time on their hands, I think. Both of these treats are on vinyl, which has the added benefit of getting me up every 30 minutes or so to flip the record over. Otherwise I’d be permanently glued to my seat.

Watching: We’re making our way through No Direction Home, which has been rewarding so far. As Will has remarked, Dylan is remarkably straightforward in the interviews, which is probably a sign of respect for Scorcese, whom Dylan surely regards as a fellow wacko-genius. I’m sad to have missed the return of Desperate Housewives last night due to dinner party, but nothing will keep me away from the new episode of Gossip Girl tonight. Nothing!

 

Cookery Books

Over the past month or so, I’ve received two new (to me) cookbooks, Elizabeth David’s classic French Provincial Cooking and Fergus Henderson’s The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Cooking. The first was a gift from Will to celebrate our recent trip to France (I was supposed to pack it for travel reading, but I forgot); the second was a gift from our meat-lovin’-est friend, who inscribed the title page, “Will+ Jen, Enjoy! Make me something?”

The books are quite different in the cuisines they describe–David’s is self-explanatory and a strong influence on Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, while Henderson’s celebrates centuries-old British recipes for game and organ meats–but their language and approach to cooking are remarkably similar, despite their having been written more than 40 years apart. Both strive to revive and preserve rural, regional traditions of cooking and eating, with emphasis on high-quality local ingredients and simple things done well (David goes on for several pages about the various ways to boil eggs), as opposed to showy haute cuisine.

Both encourage cooks to take responsibility and show individuality when executing their recipes through deliberately vague language, for example calling for knobs of this and handfuls of that and giving only approximate cooking times and temperatures. Many of David’s recipes call for “a coffee cup (after-dinner size) of olive oil,” and almost all of them tell the cook to “throw in” several handfuls of something. Ferguson tells us to chop parsley “just enough to discipline it” and, when cleaning sweetbreads, to “give them the occasional gentle shuggle” to remove all the blood.

Despite these similarities, the tone in each is quite different. David comes across sort of as a cool but slightly scary grandmother–you want to win her praise and fear her tart judgment of having created something “insipid and flavourless.” I tried her method for ouefs mollet this morning, sort of a halfway mark between soft- and hard-boiled egg; it turned out okay, except I mangled the egg a bit in the peeling and didn’t cook it quite long enough (I guess the egg was too large and not fresh enough), so I had to stick it in the microwave for 30 seconds to finish it, which I’m sure would have horrified the old lady. Henderson, on the other hand, comes across as your buddy. I could imagine pouring out a generous tumbler of whiskey with him while shuggling, braising, and roasting odds and ends (literally) of various animals for several hours to see what happens.

Both books are now heavily dog-eared to mark recipes I plan to try in the coming months. Stay tuned for reports.

 

Deal-Makers, Deal-Breakers

Last week the Times ran a brief essay about the role literary preferences plays in our relationships, which got me thinking about how books and other media/culture details have influenced my friendships and romances over the years. Back in high school I yearned to connect to friends over the books I was reading (a lot of Kerouac and Hemingway, if memory serves), but nobody was really reading anything that wasn’t assigned in class. So I turned to music, which, along with an insecurity that made me very prickly, made me a “guy’s girl,” best friends with lots of boys, but never asked out on dates.

Throughout college, music remained the catalyst and glue of many relationships. My junior year, the man who would later become my husband (now ex) moved in with my boyfriend at the time. B had sold off his entire collection of CDs to cover his first month’s rent and was lamenting the lack of soundtrack for his leisure time. My boyfriend was neither a big reader nor a big music fan, so we were destined to fail; I made B a carefully curated mix tape of the best independent music had to offer at the time (1993), and we were an item before the year was out. Music continued to be a major meeting point for us, but it disturbed me that, in our nine-plus years together, he read only one book from start to finish–the dreaded Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I considered to be cheesy and boring in the extreme. Worse still, he couldn’t bear to listen to me describe books or articles I found interesting. Eventually the relationship imploded and I was searching again.

Next was someone who seemed promising, or at least significantly different from the ex–with a doctorate, as opposed to the barely completed BFA of the ex. Surely, someone with all those years of education would be a reader. He was, but his tastes ran to stultifyingly middlebrow thrillers and mysteries. Nothing inherently wrong with those, so long as they’re mixed in with something a little more interesting or challenging. I should have known we were doomed when he enthusiastically recommended I read The Da Vinci Code.

Currently, many of my friendships (and current Relationship) are still based in books and music. My coeditor and I share a lot of common tastes; our book and music collections have blended nicely, with enough differences in both to keep conversations interesting. Most evenings in with friends center around the minutiae of pop music, and many of my evenings out involve lively discussions about literature or journalism. The Times piece ends with the statement, “For most people, love conquers literary taste.” I have to disagree–friendship and love are based largely on commonly held values, which are strongly reflected in literary and other cultural preferences. If you don’t find common ground in these, where else will you?

 

Mmmkay…

I haven’t had an interesting Google in a while, but was rewarded today with a good one: “george costanza on the fainting couch.” I have no idea what this person is looking for, but I’m honored that a Seinfeld-related search led someone to me.