4th Of July Strip Steak Chainsaw Massacre

July 5, 2009 1:40 PM

The one thing worse than a foodie: A foodie whose cooking doesn't taste very good. That would be me.

Last night I had a couple of friends over to break in my heavenly new apartment (have I mentioned it has windows?). Id spent the day skipping around Brooklyn, picking up salt brownies at Baked, cheeses at Fairway, and organic vegetables at the Farmers Market. I was on my way to earning an advance ticket to Julie & Julia.

I decided to make a salad out of baked beets, new potatoes and sauteed garlic scapes, and crown it off with strips of steak. At the farmers market, the affable Farmer In The Dell-meets-college rock guy manning the grass-fed meat table could tell I was a little nervous and promised me all I needed to do to make a delicious steak was to marinate a piece of meat in oil and a tiny bit of lime sauce, and then, when it was showtime, broil it for a few minutes on each side. I did as was told. But somebody didn't keep up his end of the bargain. And that somebody was a cow.

At 9 pm, as fireworks were going off over the Hudson River, I wiped my brow and removed from the oven the slab of meat over which I had fretted in no insignificant way all day. It smelled delicious. But my smile gave way to a wobbly slab of horrified lips when I inspected the meat and observed it wouldn't give. It had the texture of a leather shoe.

I told myself everything would be all right once Id cut the steak into smaller pieces--big slabs are always Tonka truck-tough, right? Ribbons of steak would be a whole nother story.. But it was so fricking tough I couldn't shave off slices to distribute to everyone. We all took turns trying to cut off slivers and eventually one of the guests found a bread knife that, if applied with Schwargenegger-strength, could saw off bits of the steak. But that only got us so far: once the strips were on top of our salads, none of us could cut them with our steak knives. Or teeth.

And so, while the rest of America was celebrating the Fourth of July regarding the pyrotechnics while biting into delicious hamburgers and hot dogs, I was ensconced in my apartment, wishing I had a chainsaw on hand.

I am lucky to have such good friends--one offered to go out and buy frozen White Castle burgers, and another lovely soul laughed it off and said she was happy because it meant she was dining with mortals (I know, I know, I'm often mistaken for Aphrodite).

Something tells this mortal that she will be celebrating next Fourth alone--unless she converts to vegetarianism.

OMFG, Holden Caulfield Style

July 2, 2009 8:26 PM

As a follow-up to my previous post where a certain other blog got me wondering whether the protagonist of "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You" is the modern day Holden Caulfield, here's a passage from the book's home stretch:

Even though it was only four o'clock, Grand Central was crowded and everyone was running and pushing to get on their trains so they could get out of the city. . . . The woman I sat beside read the Bible. She had one of those laminated religious bookmarks with a gory picture of Jesus and a little pink tassel and she used it to follow the text from one line to the next. She moved her lips and very softly uttered each word when she read. There was something about the juxtaposition of the bleeding Jesus with the pretty pink tassel that unnerved me. It was like putting a severed heart into a box and covering it with pretty wrapping paper. When she got off (at Woodlawn) she kissed the bookmark and then closed it into the Bible. Sometimes I envy religious people for their comfort in believing. It would make everything so much easier.

Now let us look at the 7th grade copy of Catcher I happen to have in my bookshelf. And it should not be overlooked that the second I pulled the book down from its spot on the shelf, it opened to this exact page, from the part where Holden spends the day at Grand Central:

While I was eating my eggs, these two nuns with suitcases and all  -- I guessed they were moving to another convent or something and were waiting for a train -- came in and sat down next to me at the counter. . . . One was reading a little black book while she drank her coffee. It looked like the Bible, but it was too skinny. It was a Bible-type book, though. All the two of them were eating for breakfast was toast and coffee. That depressed me.

Look, I'm not going to point any plagiarism fingers, a la that self-published celiac-obsessed author who's after Elizabeth Hasselback, but holy rosary! I totally called it!

Someday This Post Will Be Useful To Me

July 2, 2009 9:02 AM

Sabrina Banes, headmistress of YA New York, recently asked who the modern day Holden Caulfield is. I jumped into the fray and posted a bossy comment saying there is no such thing, as characters in YA fiction are never that grumpy and antisocial these days.

Oops.

Something possessed me to buy Peter Carey's Someday This Will Pain Be Useful To You (the Lorrie Moore blurb didn't hurt) and in addition to pleasing me to no end, the book is also reminding me that I have a habit of talking out of my butt (see above). Holden Caulfield, you have met your match in James Sveck.

Phoebe Caulfierld, however, remains unrivaled. At least she does until I prove myself wrong.

Move Your Apartment AND Your Booty

June 29, 2009 6:59 AM

It is said that the three most stressful things in life are divorce, death, and moving. Not having a blood pressure measuring device on hand, I'm not sure about the last one's stress level, but I can attest to its life-disrupting ability.

I am about to move apartments, but to be more accurate I have been moving apartments for the past nine million days. My life has become a blur of duct tape and bubble wrap and I've traded in activities like keeping abreast of the news and seeing friends for drumming up ways to get shopkeepers to give me cardboard boxes (or, in yesterday's case, break into the gated area behind the mean scary local wine shop to, er, liberate the cardboard boxes that the mean scary shopkeeper was hoping to give to the sanitation department and not the likes of me).

Apart from a few kind helpful souls who have been popping onto the scene to assist me, the one thing that's kept me going is all the songs I've been greedily downloading onto my ipod.

Should you find yourself in a similar situation, here's a sampling of excellent music to move your apartment to:

Never Say Never--Romeo Void

Going Insane--Vivian Girls

Jealous Girls--The Gossip

Dance Anthem of the 80s--Regina Spektor

The latest KEXP gay-themed "Music That Matters" Podcast, especially the track by Yo Majesty, my new favorite Christian lesbian hip-hop act

I've Got Your Number--Passion Pit

And, of course, Anything by Michael Jackson

Name That Ugly Feeling

June 24, 2009 7:49 AM

Everyone knows what schadenfreude is--that gleeful feeling you get when something ugly happens to somebody you don't like (or, if you're reading Star Magazine, somebody you think you don't like). But what about its distant cousin, that reaction you have when somebody whose very existence makes you sick with envy, is blessed with that one last straw of good fortune and you realize you can no longer go on envying this person, because their life is too surreal, too wholly charmed, that you just can't even compare yourself to them any more. Because at this point there is no comparison--it's about as pointless as getting jealous of Lindsay Lohan or Shakespeare. Are you having trouble following me? Allow me to back up and provide a specific.

Say there's a perfect girl in your grade. Let's call her Agnes. She's so perfect that even such a name takes on a new life when it's hers. You wish you were called Agnes. It's not your fault you can't stand her. Nobody can. She's pretty and glossy has a line of would-be boyfriends and she also just won an award for her outstanding contributions to the world of public service (she spearheaded a program that gives pet Sea Monkees to underprivileged children in Guatemala). She will be given the award at a ceremony in London. Where Jake Gyllenhall and Robert Pattinson will also be in attendance. You want to gag.

But then get this: she comes back from the ceremony looking two inches taller and dressed in head-to-toe Chanel (did I mention the award was a $50,000 cash prize?). You're feeling sorry for yourself and on Friday night all you want to do is rent Heathers and eat fudgy food. You go to the supermarket to pick up brownie mix, and you're standing in line in your flip flops and flying cup and saucer jammies and who do you see in the pages of Star Magazine? It's Robert Pattinson making out on a London alleyway with Agnes, who is identified as his "new girlfriend, who will be co-starring in his next project"!

Ack!

But hold on--are you really upset? By this point you can only laugh, right? Can you really feel bad about yourself in comparison to Agnes? Her existence has gone from unfair to downright preposterous. It has eclipsed your tiny silly world. And it is actually funny, if you think about it.

You throw your hands in the air. The brownie mix box falls to the floor. Whatever.

And what shall we call this sinking/silly feeling that isn't schadenfreude? I had been toying with a few suggestions: Absurd-enfreude or whatEVER-enfreude or IGiveUp-enfreude. But at a recent powwow over Magnolia Bakery banana pudding, my colleague Kelly Crow, the Wall Street Journal's killer art newshound, bested me:

GoodGod-enfreude.

Does Reading About Books You Can't Bother To Read Actually Save You Any Time In The End?

June 21, 2009 1:40 PM

How did I miss it? While I was busy trying to follow the Iran elections aftermath and searching for the perfect father's day gift, last week saw the debut of Lauren Conrad's young adult novel "L.A. Candy."

The unfailingly excellent Fug Girls rushed to the local B & N and wrote a review. It's totally fun to read and it answered a lot of my questions about this opus, including what's the author photo like ("Lauren looks tremendously serious in the full-size head shot plastered on the back of the book. We're shocked they didn't also make her wear glasses and hold a pencil") and how is the writing ("Should she be clearing any room off her mantle for the National Book Award? No. But words are spelled correctly, sentences are properly constructed, and the plot and structure hold together.").

They answered it all, except for what the book's actually about. (But maybe asking such a question is even more stupid than asking what "The Hills" was actually about.)

And while we're on the YA roundup, Ginia Bellafonte wrote a New York Times Magazine piece about the books of Jodi Picoult, where "terrible things happen to children of middle-class parentage: they become terminally ill, or are maimed, gunned down, killed in accidents, molested, abducted, bullied, traumatized, stirred to violence." Not sure the piece made me want to run out and buy Picoult's latest tale of violated children, but I enjoy Bellafonte's articles, which always feel as if they were written by candlelight, and by somebody wearing a 19th century costume.

An Other People's Recommendation Even I'll Recommend

June 19, 2009 7:29 AM

Ever since my last blog post, about how everybody and their mother is convinced that "Napoleon Dynamite" and I are soul mates, the cloud of bad recommendations has been hovering overhead. Netflix is urging me to check out a Dane Cook "comedy" (talk about contradiction in terms) and the good folks at Amazon.com just sent me an email suggesting that I order a new home decor book by some socialite who once upon a time blew me off for an ill-fated "The Real Lives of Socialites" magazine story I was working on (it was an assignment, not my idea!).

But to give my friends and acquaintances a little credit, there is a recommendation that I have been receiving since forever ago and that isn't so shoddy after all. In fact, it's genius!

I discovered yesterday that I was a fool for not listening to my helpful friends earlier. After hearing at least a dozen exhortations that "Kate Christensen is going to be your new favorite writer," I started her new book "Trouble." Man, is it good. And it's not even supposed to be her best book! Kate writes like Mary Gaitskill after years of therapy--slightly messed up characters who are refreshingly forgiving and loving. And the writing is wonderful--wry and elegant and if it tries hard, it sure doesn't show.

This book goes down as easy as all the delicious tequila the two foxy forty-something female protagonists are drinking on every page of their Mexico City adventure. I gobbled up nearly a hundred pages on both legs of my daily commute, about 78 pages more than my average.

And if that's not enough, she also knows how to give a book reading that isn't dreadful. Last night, inspired by my new-found Kate Christensen fandon (okay, crush), I trekked out to Greenpoint's Word bookstore to see her read and be interviewed by Maud Newton. I was charmed by Christensen's easy laughter, amused by her assertion that all her books are "about rock and roll and %&$ing--some are just written with more literary pretension than others" (the point being that this book, which only took her three months to write, is no "Great Expectations"), charmed by her admission that she strives to write like Kingley Amis, and super grateful for the plates of buttery cinnamon chocolate cookies that she'd put out beforehand.

Be still, my heart.

Quirky Jerky

June 17, 2009 9:09 AM

Yesterday I saw a movie that's about to come out. To say it rubbed me the wrong way would be inaccurate, but it didn't rub me the right way either. It was a perfectly inoffensive emo tale about a busted-up love affair, Garden State by way of Amelie. It wasn't terrible--there were some funny jokes about the greeting card industry and none of the shots were out of focus. But still. I didn't like it enough to the point of not wanting to name it, for fear of hurting anynody's feelings.

Anyway, I think I'm starting to understand why: because despite it's good intentions, it's quirky in the worst possible way, meaning it's boring people's version of "quirky." You know what I mean by that, right? Shallow quirky, where everyone wears skinny ties and thrift store dresses. Where there's a nine-year-old girl who could be Fran Lebowivitz and Dakota Fanning's love child and who understands matters of the heart better than any of the silly grown-ups. And maybe the main character and the leading lady both like the Smiths--no way!

My real bone of contention is this sort of movie does a disservice to all the real quirks in the world. What about the 64-year-old lady who collects plastic bags that she's never going to use? Or t he diligent copy editor at my former office who I once spied nibbling the potted plant on his desk? Or my sweet father who for some reason cannot go to the supermarket without returning home with four pounds of dried figs?

Then again, maybe this all hits a nerve with me because Napoleon Dynamite, the king of boring-quirky movies, happens to prompt pretty much everyone who sees it to call me and say, "Hey Lauren, I just saw this movie that's So You!" Which is about as nice to hear as "You are a big Bozo the Clown with an overbite and a runny nose."

My (awesome, thank you very much) idiosynchracies and I will take The Notebook or National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation over that any day.

PS Happy father's day, Dad!

PPS I see the "it's good intentions" typo but my stupid software won't let me edit it. Maybe it's friends with the filmmaker?

This One Goes Out To All The Reader Ladies In The Club

June 11, 2009 8:14 AM

Just in time for wedding season . . . .we we made it into last Sunday's Styles section in the New York Times! And I'm not using the royal we--I'm talking about every single one of us. There was an article about blogs that, cough cough, fail to attract 50 million readers (like this one, this one, or this one). Yes, in case you were wondering (like my deficit of comments failed to convey this sort-of sad truth) this little blog has a steady but, um, very exclusive following. Consider yourselves members of a very private club.

The newspaper story about blogs that go flop failed to quantify how few readers constitutes a blog that don't qualify for blockbuster status, but there was one glimmer of hope: it said only 7.4 million of 133 million blogs have been updated in the past 120 days. At least  we're good on that front!

It has been suggested that if I'm serious about getting more readers I rein in my focus, and make this blog only about, say, international Band-Aid designs or pets with celiac disease. You guys down?

Dark Secrets Revealed

June 8, 2009 8:26 AM

Thanks to all of you who wrote in with guesses as to who the mystery celebrity guest at the fundraiser I attended last week (see previous post) was. I regret to inform you that every single one of you was wrong--it was not a drug lord, nor was it the mastermind behind Yonah Schimmel's knishes. It was Aaron Comess, the drummer from the Spin Doctors!

Moving on, I'm pasting in an article that ran in last weekend's WSJ about teen fiction, and how it's gotten so grim. If you want to counterbalance this phenomenon, I recommend you go out and buy every Adrian Mole book you can get your hands on (and psst! I heard a rumor of an upcoming Adrian Mole title to do with vampires!)

It Was, Like, All Dark and Stormy

Teenage readers are gravitating toward even grimmer fiction; suicide notes and death matches

By Katie Roiphe

Until recently, the young-adult fiction section at your local bookstore was a sea of nubile midriffs set against pink and turquoise backgrounds. Today's landscape features haunted girls staring out from dark or washed-out covers. Current young-adult best sellers include one suicide, one deadly car wreck, one life-threatening case of anorexia and one dystopian universe in which children fight to the death. Somewhere along the line our teenagers have become connoisseurs of disaster.

Jay Asher's "Thirteen Reasons Why," which is narrated by a dead girl, came out in March 2007 and remains on the bestseller list in hardcover. The book is the account of a fragile freshman named Hannah Baker who kills herself by overdosing on pills and sends audiotapes to the 13 people she holds responsible for making her miserable in the last year of her life. There may be parents who are alarmed that their 12-year-olds are reading about suicide, or librarians who want to keep the book off the shelves, but the story is clearly connecting with its audience--the book has sold over 200,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan.

For those young readers who find death by pill overdose inadequately gruesome, there's Gayle Forman's "If I Stay," which takes as its subject a disfiguring car wreck. The book has sold a robust 17,000 copies in its first two months on sale, and was optioned by Catherine Hardwicke, the director of the film "Twilight." The story follows an appealing cellist named Mia who goes on a drive to a bookstore with her unusually sympathetic ex-punk-rocker parents. When a truck barrels into their Buick, Mia hovers ghost-like over the scene. She sees her family's bodies crushed, then watches on as her own mangled body is bagged and rushed to the hospital. Lingering somewhere between this world and the next, Mia must decide whether to join her parents in the afterlife or go it alone in the real world. The brilliance of the book is the simplicity with which it captures the fundamental dilemma of adolescence: How does one separate from one's parents and forge an independent identity?

Of all of these adolescent confrontations with death, Suzanne Collins's "Hunger Games," which has sold over 120,000 copies since its September publication, is one of the more sophisticated. The story is set in a postapocalyptic future, in which a malign government takes one teenager from each district and pits them against each other in a televised arena until only one remains alive. The casual brutality of "Gossip Girl" and its ilk takes riveting form: the alliances formed and broken, the desperate feeling of being on one's own, the relentless competition. Every moment of the sick, macabre game is being broadcast, and much energy is spent on the clothes and the sponsors: it is a stylish postmodern "Lost" in direct collision with "Lord of the Flies."

Perhaps the most grueling of today's crop of dark books is Laurie Halse Anderson's "Wintergirls." The author is no stranger to bleakness--her 1999 novel "Speak," about a deeply miserable girl who is raped at a party, was a National Book Award finalist. Her new book conjures the terrifying delusionary inner life of a girl in a very advanced stage of anorexia. Lia starves herself in a fierce, paranoid state after her best friend dies of bulimia. While starving herself might seem an eloquent enough expression of self-hatred, Lia is also involved in cutting: In one brutal scene she sits in a darkened movie theater and carves little lines into her hip with razor blades, and later she cuts her chest with a knife as her 9-year-old half sister walks into the room and sees her. The book is at once riveting and repulsive to read, half Sylvia Plath, half diet manual.

To understand this recent wave of desperation lit, it's useful to consider the history of books read by young adults that traffic in death and cruelty and mental illness. Think of Mary going blind in "Little House on the Prairie" or the ultimate institutionalization of Holden Caulfield in "Catcher in the Rye." Teenagers have historically shown a certain appetite for calamity; they like a little madness, sadism and disease in the books they curl up with at night.

Right now, though, the motif of impending disaster--about a job that will be lost, a house that will be foreclosed, a case of swine flu that will sweep through the nation--looms large in our culture, and it may be no coincidence that the dominant ambiance of young-adult literature should be that of the car crash about to happen.

Unsettling as it is, there is a certain amount of comfort to be gleaned from the new disaster fiction; it makes its readers feel less alone. What is striking in the response to these books is how many teenagers seem to identify with their characters, even though their experiences (suicide, car crashes, starvation, murder) would seem to place them on the outer fringes of normal life.

It might appear to adults casually perusing "Wintergirls" and "Thirteen Reasons Why" that the kids and experiences within their covers are fairly uncommon and overwrought. But it seems that the extreme and unsettling situations chronicled in these books are, for many teenagers, accurate and realistic depictions of their inner lives. Your whole family may not have died in a car wreck, but it sometimes feels like they have. Everyone in the school cafeteria may not be plotting to kill you with bows and arrows, or knives, or mutant killer insects, but it feels like they are. In the theater of adolescence, with all the sturm and drang of separating from parents, with the total stress of just having to be yourself in the hallway at school, perhaps these books feel, at times, like a true and reasonable representation of daily life. It may be that the feverish drama of a 15-year-old's private universe finds its natural form in these tales of destruction and death.

Given the grim story lines, not to mention absence of designer shoes and haircuts that readers of lighter young adult titles are accustomed to, it's easy to assume that this new batch of young-adult books peddles despair. In fact, the genre is more uplifting than the fizzy escapism that long dominated the young adult marketplace. Today's bestselling authors are careful to infuse the final scenes of these bleak explorations with an element of hope: The heroine wins the hunger games and does not die, Lia is headed toward recovery at the end of "Wintergirls," Mia decides to live at the end of "If I Stay," and Clay reaches out to another desperately unhappy girl in "Thirteen Reasons Why," in the hope of saving her from Hannah's fate.

There is, embedded in all of these grown up, gritty, unsettling books, the classic fairy tale reversal: the happyish ending. Ms. Anderson, in many ways the doyenne of this disturbing genre, says that ending on an encouraging note "is part of my moral code. Teenagers need to see a model of hope and growth."

As alarming as these books are, there is in all of this bleakness a wholesome and old-fashioned redemption that involves principles like triumph over adversity and affirmations of integrity. In the end, these investigations of personal disaster are much less depressing than the "Gossip Girl" knockoffs which initially seem frolicky and fun but are actually creepy and morally bereft and leave you feeling utterly hopeless.