Chicken Marsala for Two, Please

So, how did everyone spend Valentine's Day? Dressed up, at a fancy restaurant? Or perhaps carping the entire day about how cynical and commercial, and in no way a true measure of love, the "holiday" is? Well, I'll tell you how I spent mine - the same way I've spent the past four Valentine's Days: eating Chicken Marsala and watching Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

You don't need to wait until next Valentine's Day to get me this shirt.

Like every good tradition (for I feel it can now safely be classified a tradition), this originated by chance. I felt like eating Chicken Marsala, and just happened to have received The Shining in the mail at that time (for these were the days when Netflix discs in hard copy prevailed). It was only by coincidence that I found myself snowed in, newly single, eating a romantic meal alone and watching a decidedly unromantic movie about being snowed in not...quite...so alone.

The tradition has not flourished because of cynicism, though the irony does snare converts. I have enacted the tradition twice with boyfriends, once following a breakup, and one year with two beloved friends. Everyone agrees that the tradition has great merits: Chicken Marsala is delicious, and The Shining is a brilliant and kick-ass film. At first I enjoyed it on these factors as well as the goofy incongruity. However, as the tradition takes root and lives on, I see that it has genuine appropriateness for the occasion, to wit:

1) The Shining is about relationships.
Granted, the central relationships of the story are horrific (in all senses of the word) - whether you consider the main union that between Jack and Wendy, or Jack and the hotel, these are exploitative, parasitic, dominating relationships that threaten to (or succeed in) erasing one member's personality and replacing it with a gruesome shell.

2) The Shining is a winter movie.
One of the winteriest movies outside of Christmas. Let's not forget that Valentine's Day is a winter holiday. Depending on your vantage point, it is a beacon in the long, gray cold, or an overhyped event upon which too much hope and dependence are stacked. Much like many relationships.

3) The Shining is about love.
Watch Wendy's switch from comforting Jack after his nightmare (about killing his family with an axe) to full-body vigilance when Danny appears with his sweater mysteriously torn. There is no question which relationship takes priority, and there is no limit to what Wendy will risk for her son. Surely these, more than even greeting cards or diamonds, are genuine markers of love.

So I welcome my dearest friends to join me well into the future to view The Shining and eat Chicken Marasala and reflect on love, Snow Cats and, yes, axe murder. Because The Shining is also about that.

Soup reviews

This soup kind of tasted like sushi.

This week in taxidermy: Chris Marker edition

Everyone knows the hottest place to take your time-travel girlfriend on a date:

The stuffed bird wing (NPI) of your natural history museum, of course.

La Jetee (1962)

Unfortunately, the film in its entirety was taken down from YouTube shortly after Marker died earlier this week, but it's still available sans subtitles in three parts.

And while I can't pretend to any degree of connoisseurship, the superabundance of Internet tributes has brought Marker's site, GORGOMANCY, to my attention. It's a lot of fun to explore - takes me back to 7th grade computer classes in the best possible way. Evidently it is not too early to feel nostalgic for the Internet. I really like "Museum" (no surprise!). Check it!

This week in taxidermy

Lonesome George - a creature whose name is vaguely familiar to me either from some long-ago National Geographic or because “Lonesome George” just sounds like someone we should already know – Lonesome George has died. He was the last of his subspecies of Galapagos tortoise and estimated to be approximately 100 years old. He was renowned, among other reasons, for his inability to produce an heir.

Not Lonesome George.

Talk of the Nation features an interview with Linda Cayot of the Galapagos Conservancy, who knew Lonesome George and many other tortoises personally and offers a touching tribute to a one-of–a-kind tortoise. One of her most poignant insights concerns George’s upbringing:

FLATOW: Let me ask you, you said something very interesting before. You said that George had a unique personality. Do tortoises really have personalities?

CAYOT: Well, you know, I wouldn't say in general…

She goes on to clarify that George didn’t have much of a personality, either, except insofar as he was even less sociable than other tortoises:

George was never very interested in any other tortoises. He was pretty much of a loner. And if you think about his life on Pinta, he spent probably the first half of his life alone on that island, and maybe by the time he'd gotten company with other tortoises, he just wasn't too into socializing much anymore. … I think what made George so different was having grown up alone.

Following an autopsy that put to rest any lingering suspicions of foul play, it was reported that Lonesome George’s corpse will be (what else?) stuffed. At that point, Lonesome George will presumably be stationed in the Galapagos National Park Visitors’ Center, where that most asocial of tortoises will be condemned to an eternity of posing for photos with tourists.

Henry Nicholls, author of Lonesome George: The Life and Loves of a Conservation Icon, advocates against George’s stuffing by presenting a not so brief history of outrage at embalmed celebrity animals and, unfortunately, no accompanying substantial argument. I, on the other hand, believe mounting is the single most appropriate marker not only of George’s passing but of the passing of his entire subspecies and the more than decimation of tortoisekind for which he stands. The Galapagos Islands exist in the contemporary Western mind in a state of suspended Victorian-period scientific discovery. What more fitting tribute than taxidermy, the display of pure, oblivious objectification of an animal under the guise of scientific inquiry? Nicholls offers an alternative, artier suggestion, the display of “Lonesome George's empty shell, carefully oiled and set on a plinth.” I think this is Nicholls’ way of saying that contemporary audiences are incapable of digesting symbolism with criticism or irony and need to be presented the turtle corpse equivalent of a bald eagle with a tear running down its cheek feathers to recognize the urgency of conservation. He is probably right. But I doubt a carefully oiled empty shell will have the kind of staying power a hideously degraded taxidermied animal body does (and they all become hideous in time), and I love the idea of morbid, outmoded fads resurfacing and creating continuity in our own time. Plus ça change... The world may be slightly altered for Lonesome George’s subspecies’ passing, but human tastes for the grotesquely sentimental haven’t changed a bit. And that includes the outrage and discomfort.

All I think about is...

It's Tuesday, which means I have to post.

All I think about is   resumes   and I ate so many   honey mustard pretzel pieces   today.

English degrees and editorial job aside, I still don't have a firm grasp on irony, but I do know that the operative rule is: the crueler the better. And, in among the cruellest of ironies, after nearly a year of unemployment, a substantial portion of my (paid) workload is now formatting, editing and reviewing resumes. Is it less depressing when they aren't my resumes? Um, a little? It's good to know the countless hours I spent drafting countless resumes over the past year were actually job training, though I must admit wearing business casual rather than pajamas makes it easier to cope with the vomity Pavlovian panic response they elicit. Don't give up, unemployed friends: you're developing a marketable skill. Just put on some clothes and you're almost there.

Speaking of abrupt transitions, Blogger has changed its interface, making it easier for users like me to check out the stats Wordpress-proficient folk have known how to monitor for years. It seems a not insubstantial bloc of my hits (and there have been a shocking number of them...) come from Google image searches for Doritos Dinamitas. Those are my people.

I say that with tongue in cheek, but, to be honest, I can use reminders. Frankly I'm having difficulty reconciling the external impressions from this new environment and the feedback on the image I project with my gelatinous (pretty set, but susceptible to pressure and made of boiled hooves) sense of the world and myself. It's amusing and a little flattering to be described as "poised" by coworkers or compared to a ballerina (that happened), but it's refreshing to remember that I am someone who can spit out 2000 words on hot dogs ex tempore. I hope people like reading it, and I hope Qataris like Googling pictures of it, because I need to keep writing. Writing things that aren't resumes, especially.

All I think about is...

Fill in the blanks:

All I think about is _transsexuals_ and I ate so many _meatballs_ today.

There is no connection between transsexuals and meatballs aside from that opening sentence. It is a non sequitur. I'm going to use it on Tuesdays.

Why so many meatballs? That's only the half of them. Today I made some fuckin' meatball soup, using this recipe for miniature chicken meatballs from Bon Appetit. This was rewarding in every way, as

a) I find the meatball-making process ("meatballing") extremely satisfying in itself. I'll resist rhapsodizing on the experience of kneading ground meat with the fingers, but - as a general rule, I prefer using my hands to prepare food instead of implements. So earthy.

b) This recipe opens up a glorious horizon of future homemade Spaghetti-Os, which cannot be overstated. I've gone Spaghetti-Os with Meatballs-free for years (on principle) and my ethical conviction is about to pay off. This will definitely turn out a lot better than my homemade Spaghetti-Os with Franks experiment.

Tuesday, everyone! What is all you think about? What did you eat so much of?

Jenna Rexx, volume 1: Take My Advice

Here's a new feature, because I'm clearly an authority on a lot of things and I have the time to think things through that functional members of society are short on. I suspect this may become a recurring feature, because, let's face it, I have my shit TOGETHER and am ready to dispense wisdom on any number of subjects. My areas of expertise are exploding as we speak, like some kind of cosmic phenomenon that I'll be an expert on shortly.

As befits a regular feature, I'm going to implement a graphic (ekphrasis alert): A bespectacled dinosaur consulting an encyclopedia, raising a claw as if to say "Eureka. I have the advice you need." Jenna "Rex," get it?

Anyway, on to the recommendation. I should have explained that Rexx is a cute abbreviation for recommendations, but I was getting ahead of myself with the wisdom. I just have to share a [hyperbole] podcast with everyone: Throwing Shade, a member of the Maximum Fun podcasting network. The basic premise of Throwing Shade is that the hosts, a gay man and a lady, discuss issues of particular interest to ladies and gay men (which are, of course, issues for everybody). That description, however, doesn't do it a lick of justice; instead, to illustrate, I'll say that I have on two separate occasions regretted listening to it while driving because tears of laughter clouded my vision and causing a traffic accident became a serious concern. Bryan and Erin don't walk the line between smart analysis and adolescent vulgarity: they swerve all over it like drunk rednecks on karaoke night. You don't have to be a lady or a gay man to appreciate the show, because it's about everything: recent discussions have covered The Hunger Games, marriage equality, and faking graphic stomach ailments to get out of hooking up. Just give it a shot. Listening to podcasts requires no time investment most people aren't making on a daily commute anyway, and this one makes you laugh so hard you might pee. Win win WIN.