Unyeasted breads have a deep, hearty, honest spirit with a certain substantial integrity. Dense and thick-crusted, they require a good bread knife for cutting and a certain endurance for chewing…
No matter how much I mentioned the dense, “bricklike” nature of some of these breads, still I received many letters from people wondering why the bread came out of the oven like a piece of building material. O.K., they are not to everyone’s taste, but some people really like this sort of thing: “How real,” they say, “How flavorful.”
— Edward Espe Brown in The Tassajara Bread Book, 25th Anniversary Edition
I’ve been finding a lot of inspiration in a particular kind of far-out food book. Not dietary inspiration; something like philosophical inspiration. Emotional inspiration? Attitude inspiration. The connecting thread seems to be authors who used to practice more extreme diets. Former vegans, former macrobiotics, former hippies. Some of these books have consistent ways of respecting radicalisms and moderations at the same time, finding another level of inclusion where you get the thorough, grounded ethics of radical thought without the isolating righteousness. I find myself re-reading bits of non-content like the introduction to a recipe, just for the tone or the attitude.
Does that Bread Book passage do any of that for anybody else? I know I’m reading the way I need to read.
This is helping me rename a personal communication quest that I’ve been naming and renaming for, I don’t know, fifteen years? My teenaged fixation was how to be honest and also nice (both in the sense of liked and in the sense of kind). Later it was how to have a critical analysis without alienating people who don’t. How to be compassionate without self-censorship. How to make space for differences without them being cast as disagreements or negativity. How to maintain boundaries without being judgmental. Consideration without passivity. Empathy without enabling. Belonging without conformity. How to make connections across differences. All of these draft mission statements have been discarded or modified, but I’m getting somewhere. I want to joke that it wouldn’t be hard to be both more honest and more kind than teenaged me, but that isn’t true. It has been hard!
Flipping through a chapter called Vegetarian Ethics and Humane Meat that kept me up late last night, I have totally failed to find a quotable section. I started just collecting words. “Much depends,” “life and death and life,” appreciation, reflection, mistakes, “not so easy,” “Plan B,” courage, “emotionally spent,” responsibility, “more directly involved,” experiments, clumsy, “I’m very curious,” “our memories diverge… isn’t memory funny?” Vocabulary for a big, thoughtful mess.
Who said that keeping up with fashion is the ultimate way to create anxiety? Connecting people in a big mess seems like the opposite to that. Seeking ways for many fashions to co-exist together is comforting and useful. So I guess that’s the communication quest for now. It must seem like this is too abstract to possibly be useful in my real life, but I bet I will refer to this in the next 24 hours, trying to explain a decision or action to someone. “It’s like the unyeasted bread! I know how to do this!”
Typos create alternate realities. From the promo copy for Mauve: how one man invented a colour that changed the world, in the local library’s online catalog. Surreal book titles create alternate realities, too.
Beyond the Mat (WWF wrestler Chyna goes shopping with her friend. That barely counts but I’m partial to weird shopping scenes.)
The Celebration (Lots of little chats.)
Pan’s Labyrinth (Again, lots of conversations.)
Terminator (A few small chats.)
Terminator 3 (Feminine Terminator steals a woman’s stuff… Can I put only the car chase in bold?)
Doctor Who: Carnival of Monsters (The Doctor’s sidekick tries to enlighten a woman who is stuck in a timeloop.)
The Pee Wee Herman Show (Miss Yvonne and Hermit Hattie talk about make up.)
Big Top Pee Wee (This one is probably for fans only.)
Movies that failed.
A Scanner Darkly (My rational mind rates this movie as only medium-good, but some other part of me has a lot of affection for it. The sad ending. The perfect Philip K. Dick moment when Keanu is told to put himself under extra surveillance. It has a purity.)
Jean Claude Van Damme
Bloodsport (Probably would not have been fun without watching JCVD.)
The Godfather
The Godfather Part 2
Terminator 2
Terminator 4
The Dark Knight (I’m fascinated that I find this movie so satisfying and so fascist at the same time.)
Bold means I’m glad I watched it.
This month’s lists are evidence that my neighbours Casey and Jessica are fond of renting entire series of Hollywood movies. I have also watched with them: all the Die Hard movies, all the Rambo movies, Alien and Predator in preparation for Alien vs. Predator, and probably more.
The fact that I go along for these action movie marathons could probably go in the same category as the facts that I only like to watch sports when international championships are broadcast at 4 in the morning, and that if I don’t see the midnight premier of questionable superhero movies I probably will never watch them. Bland content is a good foil for intense viewing contexts.
The impassioned claim that there exists an unemotional, value-free scientific method (or context of justification) may be interpreted as an emotional rejection and repudiation of the feminine and, if this is so, it would mean that scientific practice carried out (supposedly) in an “objective,” value-free, unemotional way is in fact deeply and emotionally repressive of the feminine.
— Brian Easley, “Patriarchy, Scientists, and Nuclear Warriors”
Surprisingly / not surprisingly, I have thought a lot about the value of “douche” as a politically correct cuss word. I’ve adopted it as my all-purpose, positive family values cussing option. My take is that douches are maligned for feminist and body-positive reasons. Douches are marketed to clean vaginas that are already self-cleaning, and the unnecessary douches can cause microflora imbalances and infections. Douches are terrible, urban legend birth control that can actually increase the chances of conceiving. Douches: body hating, body damaging, anti-choice, agents of unnecessary consumption. And fun to say. Doooosh.
Meanwhile, almost every other cuss word is maligned for some body-hating, bigoted reason. Genitals, bodily fluids, sexual activities… I love all those things. I need a bigger pallette of loving cusses before I can give up the fun sounds of fuck, shit, tits, ass, cock, sucking, blowing, and company, but it’s good to have a start.
Other takes on douche as a swear? Seeing it paired up with enemas is actually giving me pause. I’m thinking the only reason enemas get a bad rap is because of taboos about buttholes, and related taboos about gay sex and maybe enema sex play. I’m pretty much pro-butthole on all those issues. So then I wonder if I should be considering the sex play possibilities of douches, and any douche fetish communities I might be further marginalizing. The problem: everything can be used for sex play. That criteria would eliminate every possible PC swear word. I’m sticking with douche for now, but I’d love to hear from anyone offended by that.
Every time I mention that I use homemade deodorant, I realize that I’ve never actually linked to the awesome internet recipe that I use.
So here it is, Angry Chicken’s homemade deodorant recipe, styled after Lush’s Aromacreme natural deodorant but less likely to cause a rash. This is the only deodorant recipe I’ve ever tried, and I’ve been using it happily for about a year. It’s cheap and it works and it gives me a better vibe than the “you stink” industry.
Our personal household version is a little simpler, like so:
5 Tablespoons shea butter
3 Tablespoons baking soda
2 Tablespoons corn starch
Essential Oil (ylang ylang, rosewood, nutmeg and cinnamon)
Melt, stir, pour into container(s), cool. Store extra in the fridge.
In her golden years, my mom suffers from Dementia with Lewy Bodies (think Parkinson’s + Alzheimer’s).
Here we are in the garden. She’s calling me Jim (my father’s name) and thinking she’s having a dream…
I expected this video to make me sad, but I felt happy watching it. I spent a lot of afternoons sitting in gardens with my grandpa in his advancing dementia, and our interactions were often like this. Me guessing what would help him or soothe him, just sitting and telling each other we loved each other with words and pats and hand squeezes. My trying to understand his observations but not really getting it; him trying to understand my observations but not really getting it; both of us trying to be ok with that. I’m happy that sometimes when communication breaks down, it can break down into just inarticulate love.
I have often wished that the function of the beauty industry was to help people get better at beholding beauty. It could be like art appreciation classes that show you what can be appreciated about art you didn’t like looking at before. That might even be the root of my complicated gut reactions about body image activism performances like burlesque. Does it help me see beauty in a new place, or does it just involve new people winning at the same old beauty contests? I think my guts know I’m looking to broaden my beholding skills, not get caught up in competitions.
So I liked this comment about aesthetics and perception, for focussing on “coming to terms with what you consider ugly,” and on ways to help people do that.
Beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness. Wabi-sabi is ambivalent about separating beauty from non-beauty or ugliness. The beauty of wabi-sabi is, in one respect, the condition of coming to terms with what you consider ugly. Wabi-sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else. Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the proper circumstances, context, or point of view. Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace.
… It is almost as if the pioneers of wabi-sabi intentionally looked for such examples of the conventionally not-beautiful— homely but not excessively grotesque— and created challenging situations where they would be transformed into their opposite.
Reading this brought up a big sensory memory of what that feels like— I get pretty thrilled and spaced out by perception shifts. I heard an NLP trainer say that it’s common to get spaced out by big new ideas, that spacing out is the physical sensation of a bunch of your brain synapses reorganizing at once. I don’t know if that’s true, but the idea delighted me.
