I love a good Dutch Oven.

I am getting married in about 8 weeks.

My evenings consist of creating spreadsheets for the caterer, using multicolored post-its notes to arrange seating, scouring the internet for gifts for the groomsmen, purchasing things (favors, accessories, place cards, thank you notes . . . and so on), and obsessively checking my registries to see if anyone has bought me presents.

Certain presents have already arrived, and one seems to have been burgled by Target, a company that will not resend things after they have been returned to the sender because they were erroneously delivered to an incorrect address.

If you happened to buy me the Hamilton Beach Toastmaster, I am sorry. I will not be mastering toast anytime soon unless you purchase it again (with your refund) and send it to my new address.

Presents are why would should all get married. Seriously.

You don't even have to get married, actually. I'm fairly certain that the internet will let you register for gifts for any occasion. I suggest doing this for all of your birthdays, housewarmings and the third Thursday of every month, which could become a day to celebrate your awesomeness.

Here are some things I've received on my porch recently:

*A set of ceramic mixing bowls. Red on the outside, white on the inside. Neat little pouring spouts.
*A 10-piece Kitchen Aid nonstick cook set, featuring a stock pot, a high-sided sauce pan, 2 saute pans, 2 small saucepans and 4 assorted lids that fit these things. They are red. With rubberized grips.
*A set of 6 gorgeous martini glasses.
*A Mario Batali Dutch Oven. (Jennie Orphan makes jokes about this all the time, but it is the most useful piece of cookware I've ever owned.) It is red.
*A 20-piece set of gorgeous mahogany-colored Asian style plates.
*A set of low bowls to go with said 20-piecer.

All of the mahogany-colored things looked redder online, to my slight dismay. They were too beautiful not to love.

It wouldn't be fair to say that I'm getting married just for the presents, but the presents are what make it a bearable thought in these final stages of planning.

In the bedroom.

Easily the most important room in the house, the bedroom was the first room we set up on our very long, very tiring moving day. This is the fantastic Cal King bed we got off Craigslist for $350. There is a large possibility that it could be one-of-a-kind, as we purchased it from a furniture craftsman with an obvious pituitary gland disorder. (He was a giant, close to 7 feet tall, and his larynx seemed too large for his throat, causing his speech to be strained in an unusual way.) He told us he had set it up to show some hotel clients and needed to sell the model. So I assume that we may be the only people in the world with this bed. It has a padded headboard, as well as padded sides, which seems slightly unnecessary. It is full of awesomeness.



The bedspread we got at Bed, Bath & Beyond. Those who know me know I prefer everything to be red, but in the interest of design and compromise, I have decided to limit redness only to the one room in the house that is truly mine: my kitchen. We had wanted to do something very Indian/Peacocky with this room, but The Perfect Peacock Sheets by Natori are $600 just for the comforter, we decided to Moulin Rouge the place, by which I mean made it match our set of Moulin Rouge promotional posters. So this was the bedspread we agreed on, and it should be noted that the copywriters at the Bed, Bath & Beyond website seem to think that the stripe with the burnt velvet is in a leopard print pattern. It even looks leopardy in the picture. But do not be fooled! The burnouts in the velvet are actually flowers, which makes a lot more sense, considering that the embroidered panels on the bedspread also feature flowers.

And here are the aforementioned promotional posters around which this room is based:



Another thing I love about this place is that my closet is mirrored--never again will I not have the joy of full-length mirrors! Of course, for some strange reason, our hallway closet is also mirrored, which just seems unnecessary to me. There's no point in giving a hallway the illusion of width. Also, the hallway mirrors are a bitch to clean. But I have no complaints about the ones in the bedroom, even if they make our TV seem minuscule.



Finally, my dresser, which is a new product in the Ikea universe. It's actually so nice that it doesn't look like it came from Ikea. (The black-stained wood helps.) It was $270, and sturdier than any Ikea dresser I've had before. Thus far, the drawers have not sagged under the weight of my many clothings.

Mary, what kind of homosexual are you?

That color right there is mauve.

I actually wouldn't call that mauve exactly. The best name I have for it is perhaps "dusty rose" or pinky-grey, the latter of which seems to be the most truly accurate. It was not our color choice, but rather the choice of previous tenants, whichever one decided that the carpet du jour should be uncleanable, unnice feeling burbur.

So that's the true wall color. Let it be known it took me 3 or 4 shots before I realized that I needed to photograph it without flash because the wall is actually not a matte surface. Here are the rest of the bathroom features, with flash, so they're extra-shiny.

Ze sink:



Above ze toilet:


The art piece here is a limited edition purchased for me by my friend Anders several years ago as a birthday gift. It's called "Violet" by John John Jesse. Yes, she is a vampire dressed like a slutty Vietnamese soldier. Bare breasts are totally appropriate for bathroom art.

Ze toilet cove:



That remarkably small and slightly pointy toilet bowl is what we face every day. It's not the smallest toilet I've ever seen, but it does seem to be slightly irregular in size.

Anyway, the bathroom is not spectacular. I wish I had a good picture of the shoddy tile work, wherein the linoleum tiles don't quite match up and you can see the totally awkward harvest gold color that is under them. Regardless, the bathroom does its job. And is 8 million times nicer than any other bathroom I've ever had in an apartment.

Welcome to our evil lair.

I decided I would start sharing photographs of the house by starting with the least put together room so that your expectations have nowhere to go but up.

Welcome to our study/office/kitten restroom/evil lair/library/editing room/Marcus' closet.

We've got about five bookcases in here and all of them are full-ish. The anal retentive part in me spent about two days attempting to organize the books in some comprehensible fashion. Marcus has a shelf and a half of film books, nearly two full shelves dedicated to theatre books, and then the rest is about 4 shelves of text/reference books, an entire shelf dedicated to my thesis work (with Francesca Lia Block books stuffed in because they fit perfectly there) and the rest is all general fiction, divided either visually by size or somewhat categorically. (Black writers and poetry share a shelf, Dave Eggers and Chuck Palahniuk share a shelf with gay authors . . . It makes sense to me, and that's really all that matters.)

(That's merely a fraction of the bookage in this room.)

This is Marcus' command center of doom aka "editing suite." I tried not to photograph it too closely because, well, its the only area of the house that I've allowed him to control . . . which means its messy. (This is also the reason I did not photograph the part of the room that consists of his closet and the kitten's litter box.)



My current prized possession: antique roll-top desk circa 1930.



I actually just acquired this yesterday off Craigslist for about $60. That's an astoundingly good price for a roll-top desk, and if you actually looked at this thing, you'd know why. It is scratched to hell. It's previous owners obviously didn't love it quite as much as I will, but I do give them props for ruining the value of this desk by cutting out a hole under the roll-top hutch to run computer cables through. I mean, that's super clever and all, and I really appreciate it, but I'd never be able to resell this thing after I refurbish it for any decent value.



Luckily, I'm not planning on selling it. Ever. The desk actually has a wall-mounted shelf that goes above the roll-top, which I intend to refurbish before I screw it into the wall. (NB: None of the knobs on the desk are the original white ceramic ones. I've already replaced them with more attractive knobs.) I'm armed with wood filler, dark walnut stain and a satin-finish varnish. This desk and I will have a lifetime of fun together.

More to come, including the very odd shade of pinky-gray on our bathroom walls, my dining room chair project, the complete lack of wall-art in our living room and our impressive media collection.

A massive life drop.

While I'm sure its obvious to most of you, I haven't been posting in awhile. There are reasons for this, I assure you. Chief among them is the fact that I moved away from the Santa Barbara area and back to the Bay Area, and for the first week and a half of this new residence, I could not actually use my laptop at all. It seems that as I was selling off all my Santa Barbara furniture, Calliope no longer had things to climb and decided instead to nibble on the charger cord that brings my laptop the sweet gift of life. I did not actually notice this until the night before I moved in to my new apartment because squatting at my parents' house meant stealing their internet via their computer, since they don't have WiFi.

And then there was the mess that is this apartment.

Let me go back for a moment and try to briefly state the chain of events that lead to me moving back to the Bay Area: I was already considering looking for other work because living in Santa Barbara on the scant salary the Biz Times paid me was going to be far too difficult, especially considering the whole "I'm getting married soon" thing. So my grandmother offers me her house. I am reluctant at first because what the fuck do I need with a house, but I eventually cave to the notion of free rent. So I decide to move back here at the end of June. All is well, until I realize that my grandmother is offering me the house under the completely incorrect and not very well thought out assumption that I'd be going to "gradjiate" school in the fall (where? Berkeley?), and when I attempt to explain the process of graduate school applications and how I'm not necessarily planning on being in the state of California for the rest of my life, she decides she's not ready to give up her house because she thought that I would just settle down there and stay until I die.

What the fuck?

So in mid-May, when all this goes down, I have already quit my job, been replaced at said job, do not have a job in the Bay Area and now no longer have a home at which it wouldn't matter if I didn't have rent money. Fuck you, grandma.

My parents offered to rent Marcus and I one of their apartments at the reduced Mom & Dad rate, which is nice of them. And we are told we can move in July 2, which, due to the idiocy of the previous tenants and their complete inability to move their shit from the premises becomes July 6. Now, the obvious problem with this is that we had already made appointments for cable, electric, etc. to be hooked up, which requires the moving in of expensive televisions and things. The previous tenants acquiesce to this need and let us move giant televisions in on July 3, when we are scheduled to have cable installed. After we have hauled said giant light boxes up the stairs to our top-unit duplex, we get a call from the cable provider saying that they can't install internet because their entire internet system is down and, in addition, they are out of DVR boxes. So, we basically just hauled all that shit upstairs for nothing.

And then our house nearly caught on fire.

Shortly after all this, a giant wildfire breaks out in the hill above our house. Fortunately, the wind was blowing the flames steadily toward the more expensive houses, so our lives did not get progressively worse. We actually sat on the patio with our neighbor's little dog and watched all the firefighting action. That was probably the most exciting part of my whole first week back.

But we did finally get to move in on Friday the 6th and we made pretty quick work of setting the place up, at least in terms of the bedroom, living room and kitchen. We found an amazing Cal King bed with padded headboard on Craigslist for $350, a couch and a chair and a half for $625, tons of bookcases removed from my grandmother's possession and a lot of decently priced Ikea items.

But other than the slow settling in process, finding work has not been going so well, and the lack of having a job makes me restless and sad. I could fill that time with blogging, but I don't much feel like it. So the house update is my massive life drop for today. I'll post pictures eventually.

Pop Art: Non-Warholian Paintings of Celebrities

I saw this link on PopSugar and decided it was too cool not to repost some of my favorite images. Worth1000.com held a Photoshop contest in which people photoshopped celebrities into Renaissance, Baroque and 18th century art (although there are definitely some modernists, post-modernists and impressionists that slipped in there). I think some of these work a lot better than others, by which I mean the face of the celeb is so smoothly integrated into the artistic qualities of the original painting or fit the qualities of the original so well that it seems like the celeb was part of the original.

For instance, I think Viggo Mortensen really does look like Albrecht Durer:



And while I don't know the painting this portrait of Natalie Portman is referencing (though I believe its Degas from the color and brushwork), I think it was the best integration of Natalie's face out of all the various Natalie Portman art portraits:



And if anyone were going to be in a Tamara De Limpicka painting, it should be Marilyn Manson and Dita Von Teese:



This one of Orlando Bloom as Jacques-Louis David's Telemachus in "Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis" is a particular favorite because Orlando already spends so much of his time in Ancient Epics:



See? He fits right in.

I'm going to post one more to conclude, just because I like the idea of making a comedy about the American revolution starring Jack Black as Paul Revere, that guy who took all the credit for something a Jewish vacuum cleaner named Israel Bissel really did. (I would suggest that Israel Bissel be played by Sacha Baron Cohen, since we know that we cannot put Jack Black and Ben Stiller together in a movie lest it fail like Envy did.)




Here is a link to all of the entries, for your amusement.

Awesome Band Names, Part 1

I spend a good deal of time turning example sentences from my linguistics courses into band names. These are usually things taken from the word for word translations or example sentences in languages other than English. I'm hoping to make regular lists of these, and lists in general. (Because clearly, the thing I'll miss most about my current job is making lists every week.)

So, my first list of awesome names for bands, with a description of the kind of music I want them to play:

1. Trash Pasta (a ska band from Jersey City)
2. Rancid Crab (a Rancid cover band, preferably from Baltimore)
3. poweredbylesbians (a lesbian grunge band, with possible forays into hair metal)
4. Mr. Apple Says Ow! (my Japanese pop group)
5. Wackernagel Clitics (I can't imagine what kind of music they play, but I sincerely hope it involves accordians)

I am full of facts.

I have managed to resist these for a while, but part of me always secretly wants to fill them out. So now that Jenn, Bri and Drew have done it, I will cave in to peer pressure.

1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Eight acts of my randomness:

1. Every morning, my cat and I engage in a battle of wits over my cereal bowl, wherein I must contort myself into a number of positions to prevent her from sticking her little cat hands into my milk. Sometimes I win. Sometimes she wins. But I don't know why she does this because she knows she will get a little bit of milk when I am done anyway. It really seems unnecessary on her part.

2. I have a face that crazies trust. I have had people touch my feet on the street, follow me around grocery stores to talk to me about the U.S. Army, and chat me up in Russian because I was dressed so nicely I just couldn't have possibly been American. (Who are these people and why do they find me?)

3. I had my first and only seizure in a hookah bar on Haight Street.

4. I have thrown up into a creme brulee bowl in an Irish restaurant in Las Vegas.

5. The best Christmas gift I have ever received was an "FBI Agent Kit" from my dad when I was 13. Because I loved The X-Files so much, my dad not only got me lots of show memorobilia including the action figures from the recently release movie and season by season episode guides, he also created an elaborate box full of X-Files references. He bought me my own trench coat, a giant flashlight, bags and bags of sunflower seeds (because they're Mulder's favorite), a leather-bound copy of Moby Dick (Scully's favorite book) and a little stuffed Pomeranian (because Scully had a Pomeranian named Queequeg). My dad has continued to hunt down little X-Files treasures for me to this day. A few Christmases back, he bought me Mulder and Scully's FBI badges. Last year, I got a bust of David Duchovny.

6. I have auditioned for the Jeopardy College Tournament.

7. I have accidentally ordered a blowjob in a bar in Italy. (I didn't get one. People were reasonably sure that I didn't really mean to order that, as I don't have a penis. What was I trying to order? A grapefruit.)

8. I love carnies in a way that people probably shouldn't love carnies, and yet, I find clowns to be scary beyond all reason.

I can't tag anyone because all the people I would tag have already been tagged or have already done it . . . except Marcus.

Cake or Death?

Death by Cake by Daniela Edburg

Eddie Izzard does this bit about poorly designed executions in which the soon-to-be-dead are given a choice between "Cake or Death?" Naturally, everyone chooses the cake, and when there is no more cake, cheeky dead men walking suggest that they'll have the chicken instead.

That's only mildly relevant to the photograph above, but it appears that the subject has chosen both cake AND death.

The photograph is part of a series by Daniela Edburg exploring women, horror movies, gustatory desires and the subsequent consumption that must occur. Each of the women in the "Drop Dead Gorgeous" series is ultimately consumed and destroyed by that which she has overconsumed in life. There are some that refer specifically to the containers in which things come, but I find those to be less artistically interesting than they are conceptually interesting. ("Death by Saran Wrap" features a woman wrapped in a spiders web of Saran Wrap, her desires for freshness and confinement literally choking her to death.)

These photographs remind me of the work Cindy Sherman did in her "Untitled Film Still" series, in which Sherman herself posed in various costumes and settings that would evoke archetypical scenes in films. The point, of course, was to make them look as authentic as possible, such that they could be mistaken for an untitled film still.

Edburg does this kind of referencing, as well. Her references are not to genres as Sherman's were (although "Death by Tupperware" is a reference to hentai pornography, including a cat looking up a girl's skirt as she is strangled by some tentacled being in her frige), but to specific films and specific paintings. "Death by Cotton Candy" intentionally references The Wizard of Oz, in addition to being incredible beautifully composed.

Death by Cotton Candy by Daniela Edburg

"Death by M&Ms" could be a fate awaiting my friend Magen, and its this photograph that feels the most like Sherman's to me. Perhaps its the very 1970s nature of the photograph that connects it to Sherman's work in my mind, although I would guess that the more specific reference is to The Valley of the Dolls.

Death by M&Ms by Daniela Edburg

Edburg also references art. "Death by Oreos" references Whistler's "Composition in Black and Gray" (aka "Whistler's Mother"), but I find this one to be much more interesting:

Death by Slimfast by Daniela Edburg

It's based of Ingres' "Le Grande Odalisque," which I find uniquely disturbing because of the odd ways in which this woman's proportions are stretched (much like Dennis Leary's neck in this ad).

Ingres, 1814, Oil on Canvas

I love that the girl in "Death by Slimfast" seems to retain the kind of oddness about her body that the original Ingres work features (just look at that elbow!); it pairs incredibly well with the message about distorted body image presented in Edburg's photograph. Even the face in Edburg's piece is eerily close to the Ingres for me.

Daniela Edburg's other photographs in the "Drop Dead Gorgeous" series can be seen here, along with her interview with The Morning News.

Living on the Hellmouth

To those who have seen my Netflix queue, it is no secret that I have been immersing myself in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I realize that I am about 10 years too late for this show, but how was I to know that when I was 11, Buffy the Vampire Slayer would become such an important part of my life?

I can't say that it will replace The X-Files at the top of my Television Shows I'm Obsessed With list (because even though David Boreanez is playing a Fox Mulder-esque character now on Bones, Angel and Mulder are in two completely different worlds, and I like Mulder's world better), but I feel like now that I have ventured into season 4 and the absolutely worst actress in the world seems to not be sucking so much in her strange plot on the UC Sunnydale campus (yes, I mean you Lindsay Crouse, the ex Mrs. David Mamet), I can readily admit this:

I am a Buffy fan.

And to all those who have attempted to reference the show to me over the years, I'm sorry I was missing out. You all had every right to think I would like this show. I'm pretty certain that a decent amount of people in high school thought that my best friend and I were vampires. I own a bust of David Duchovny. I read tarot. I knew far more about mythology and the occult than most people ages 11-14 reasonably should. Why the hell wouldn't you have thought I'd like Buffy?

I recall once asking someone what they were for Halloween because I didn't recognize the costume. When the reply was "I'm Drusilla," I blinked in the universal signal for "please continue to supply me with more information." "From Buffy," was the statement of complete disbelief I received. "Oh," I said. In actuality, I think this exchange happened twice on two different Halloweens with two different incarnations of Drusilla: Once in 7th grade with a girl dressed as the weak, insane and childlike Drusilla who doesn't understand that dead birds don't sing (this girl went as a member of The Craft the year before, so I think she has a sort of pop-culture occult costume fetish), and once my freshman year of high school with (I believe) my friend Veronica, dressed as the truly batshit insane, hyper-sexual "I like to cut you with my fingernails and lick off your blood" version of Drusilla. In retrospect, these costumes are not perhaps the most easily recognizable, but anyone keen on the Buffy universe would have known immediately.

And that's one of the things I like so much about Buffy. I'm attracted not to the shows that everyone's watching, but often to cult shows. (And healthy doses of truly ridiculous reality television.) And I started getting into Buffy through Firefly fans, chiefly through Jenn. Jenn and I spent New Years' Eve watching Buffy season one and eating tasty cheeses and spilling beer on my couch. I went 5 months without watching Buffy after marathoning the entire first season in a night. And after I'd exhausted the other television shows I was Netflixing, I needed to find something to become invested in. So I chose Buffy.

And I'm hooked.

Season 1 was a little difficult to get through, but Season 2 was truly great. Dru and Spike are wonderful characters, and the story arc with Angel's turn hurt me so deeply inside because I am inexplicably invested in Buffy and Angel. (And now I get why everyone thinks he's so hot and why girls will watch Bones just for him.) The Season 2 finale was one of the best hours of television I have ever seen in my life, and everyone is right when they say that Buffy really hits its stride in Season 3--that's entirely correct.

I also find great joy in the fact that Sunnydale, CA is basically Santa Barbara, and that the kind of vehicular problems I experience in Carpinteria, Xander seems to always have in Oxnard.

But the two best Buffy episodes I have ever seen both involve an Oz storyline and that age-old man vs. nature motif explored in a number of ways. Season 3's "Beauty and the Beasts" features some class A writing from Joss Whedon's team, creating a 3-plot narrative rotating around the same theme: men as beasts and the women who love them. The weakest of these three stories is about a boy at Sunnydale High who turns a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde trying to "man-up" for his girlfriend. This is subordinated to the greater plot about Oz discovering his werewolfness, and finished with a note of Angel returning from Hell, soul intact, but stripped of humanity. While the first plot I mentioned is somewhat cartoonish, it works its way into the other two quite well, but it is heartbreaking to see Angel come back to us, the viewers who love him, as something even less humane than Angelus and absolutely soul-crushing when the only English word he can muster is the name "Buffy." It is also painfully sad to see Willow realize that the love of her life will always be torn between loving her and fighting his beastly nature. What really makes this episode stand out for me is that it is the only one that uses a frame narrative from an outside source. Naturally, the episode is framed by passages from Jack London's The Call of the Wild that re-emphasizes the internal struggle of all three man-beasts in the story.

My second favorite episode so far is Season 4's "Wild at Heart," in which the internal struggle between the wolf within and the taciturn man we call Oz comes to full hilt. I'm fond of the title because it immediately made me think of David Lynch's film of the same name and Nick Cage as Sailor, but other than the inherent wildness of both Oz and Sailor, the two Wild at Hearts have little to do with one another. Oz discovers another female werewolf who also leads a very similar life to his (musicians by day, wolves by night), yet she seems to have embraced her inner wolf, balking at the human mask she has to wear by day, finding freedom in her wolf form on the nights of the full moon. She asks Oz, after the two have done some regrettable things "when the wolf takes over" if he isn't the wolf most of the time, imprisoned in his human mask, rather than Oz's attempt to maintain his humanity. Seeing the look on Willow's face when she discovers Oz locked in his cage with Veruca hurt me so deeply and I wasn't prepared for the fact that it would do so. But seeing Alyson Hannigan cry breaks my motherfucking heart. It's something about Alyson Hannigan that makes me hurt so much when she's sad. Maybe its because I identify with her current role on How I Met Your Mother, or that its so easy for a kind of geeky redhead to find herself identifying with other kind of geeky redheads.

It's these kind of story arcs that Buffy is great at, and they seem to happen over and over again. It may not always be a literal beast within (sometimes, it's an evil vampiric demon), but the show's best story arcs seem to hinge on the human struggle between the good parts of our nature and whatever form the bad parts might take.

I look forward to the remainder of Season 4, and the three seasons I have left after that. And maybe, when I am deeply saddened that my Buffy journey will have come to an end, I'll move on to Angel.

Pestillence and paper products.

On Tuesday, a fly infestation was discovered in the kitchen of my office.

On Wednesday, I arrive at work to find our kitchen has been quarantined for bug extermination. The place had been "bug bombed" the previous evening.

On Thursday, the power goes out twice after I have left for class. In addition, the source of the fly infestation was unveiled upon the discovery of a rat carcass in the kitchen.

The carcass cost $150 to remove and our Managing Editor had to sign for the removal of said carcass.

I miss all the fun.

Because dishes don't just clean themselves, you know.

I once wrote a note to some rude playgoers and gave it to them after the performance. (I wrote about it once, but I don't feel like going through my archives to find it. If you're curious, I'm pretty sure it happened in Spring 2004. Possibly April.)

This was the beginning of my journey into writing and leaving passive-aggressive notes.

Because Cassie knows that all of my notes left around this house have always only pertained to one particular roommate, she recently directed me to a blog called Passive-Aggressive Notes.

I only wish that some of my notes were as creative as these, especially this dude, who really went all out in terms of theme and typographic style:



And I only long to do this with the dirty dishes and other items that creep their way into everyone's living space and were clearly the remnants of a certain roommates' irresponsible freedom trail, which is amazingly devoid of people who are not, in fact, said roommate:



Unfortunately, I don't think said roommate quite got the picture the last time I left a dirty, cinnamon-encrusted dish on her bed. The next day, that dish had magically migrated to the kitchen table. And stayed there. Thus, I clearly should have left an accompanying note.

I know that technically its a lot easier to just tell people when they suck, but leaving angry notes in a variety of Sharpie colors is a lot more rewarding for some reason. It's like the life equivalent of a detention slip. Or the non-legally binding equivalent of getting a parking ticket.

I feel like I should submit the notes about cottage cheese that are on the office refrigerator.

Or perhaps the passive-aggressive notes from the fish asking us to clean their bowl . . .

For the apparel doth oft proclaim the man.

I have a Denmark sweatshirt that I made when I costumed Hamlet on the Moon. It's just a thing. When you are involved with Hamlet, you can own a Denmark sweatshirt even if you aren't Danish or haven't been there. And when you costume an entire production by yourself, you definitely are allowed to own an item of clothing commemorating it. I wore this to work last week, for some reason.

Today, I have this conversation with one of our ad reps.

Ad Rep: When did you go to denmark?
Me: Oh, I haven't been.
Ad Rep: Where'd you get the sweatshirt, then?
Me: I made it.
Ad Rep looks puzzled.
Me: I costumed a production of Hamlet once.
Ad Rep: I grew up in Denmark.
Me: Oh. Uh, well.
Ad Rep: Hamlet takes place there.
Me: Uh, yes.
Ad Rep: I grew up next to Castle Elsinore.

And my only response to this exchange is: "I don't think I ever would have known that about you."

But obviously, if we follow his logic, its because he doesn't own a Denmark sweatshirt. So, you know, Polonius wasn't that off-base, I guess.

Yeah, about that whole saying "no" to rehab thing . . .

I love listening to Amy Winehouse. Her soulful doo-wop inspired sound is something I haven't heard in the past decade or so in pop music. Not since Lauren Hill's reinvention of doo-wop for "That Thing." But man, this girl is not fun to look at. I try to believe that every woman has the potential to be beautiful, and somehow the makeup and hair gods managed to make Amy look presentable for her album cover and music video, but I'm not totally sure how that's possible. They clearly had a lot of crazy genetics and refusual to go to rehab working against them:

Yikes.

Cooking South Beach Style

Ted Allen, of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy fame and an occasional judge on Iron Chef America, will be joining Padma, Tom and Gail as a fourth judge for the third season of Top Chef, which I will be watching religiously when it starts up again on Bravo on June 13. (The rest of the cast is up on the website, as well, but I only see the judges via this link.)

The show will be moving to Miami for this season, which is a good movie because it will keep a lot of variety in the food challenges. It's not that LA's food scene isn't vibrant and full of wonder on its own, but I'd like to see Top Chef move to different food hot spots for each season. After Miami, they could move on to New York, Portland (Ore.), San Francisco (!), Atlanta, Seattle, Denver . . . well, maybe Denver is a bit of a stretch. But I like the idea that Top Chef could keep a bit of variety by moving around the world of American cuisine.

Also, with Gordon Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen returning for a third season on June 4 to its Los Angeles location, perhaps the cooking competition scene is a little too crowed in the City of Angels. We all know Tom Collichio is great at crafting steaks . . . but Gordon Ramsay hunts his own deer.

Photographic DNA evidence.

From Meg, via Will.

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

I'd say that the program's analysis of the images is pretty accurate. It was very difficult to choose my form of art, however. There were so many good choices. And I missed the vice section entirely, yet the program seemed to know that I have an absurd number of shoes, among them several pairs of Chucks . . .

Baba kreslo.

Marcus: "According to 'The Amazing Race,' Polish people hate dwarves."
Stevi: "It's cuz dwarves steal their peroghis."
. . .
Marcus: "Clearly, my eyes aren't in as much pain because I'm making jokes about dwarves."
--discussing the exploits of Charla on the current season of The Amazing Race

This discussion was later followed by my explanation of what peroghis were called in various Salvic languages, which was met with the following from my loving fiance:
"In Russian you suck!"

Six degrees of Dr. Blight and MAL.

Meg H. brought up the character of Dr. Blight in the comments section of my original Captain Planet post, which brought up some extra strange intertextual coincidences on this blog.



Dr. Blight looks like she could be Jem's mother--they both seem to share an affinity for pink clothing and bleach-blonde hair. Prior to my Captain Planet research, I had received a text message from a friend stating that "Meg Ryan's dog looks like her." Less than a week later, Wednesday's episode of Shear Genius involves the recreation of Sally Hershberger's famous "Sally Shag"--known to those of us who are not into hair so much as "the Meg Ryan." As if Miss Ryan could not be a larger part of my life in the past week then she already is, I discover this:

Meg Ryan was the voice of Dr. Blight for the first season of Captain Planet.

And here I thought the only voice work she did was in Anastasia. Man, I'm wrong about an awful lot of Captain Planet-related things, aren't I?

It actually gets to be even more like a multimedia game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon than three Meg Ryan mentions within a week. Also in my original Captain Planet post, I referenced Tim Curry as the voice of the evil toxic smog cloud in Ferngully: The Last Rainforest. And this will bring us back to Dr. Blight.

Dr. Blight, in her slinky pink catsuit, is a bio-terrorist with a partially burned face (like a sexy version of Two-Face from Batman . . . although the Harvey Dent part of Two-Face is pretty fine in most of his incarnations). She also has a super computer that, much like Synergy on Jem and HAL in 2001, is sentient. Dr. Blight's computer, called MAL, was voiced by Tim Curry for the last few seasons of Captain Planet. (Notably, not when Miss Ryan was lending her voice to Dr. Blight.)

I'm very interested in the idea that Jem and Dr. Blight could somehow be related across the cartoon universe. Especially since, in yet another weird coincidence in the world of voice talent, Kath Soucie, who lends her shady Russian accent to Linka on Captain Planet, was also the voice of Ingrid for about 7 episodes of Jem.

Now if only he'll take us to the Dairy Queen to show off our new Balenciaga bags.

Tim Gunn has a new book out, and I will be rushing to Borders after work today to purchase it and read it while drinking and watching What Not To Wear tonight.

Behold:

There is an arcticle on MSNBC that features some exerpts from the Almighty Tim Gunn's
Guide to Quality, Taste & Style. The kicker for me--which makes me want to run out and buy this immediately--is not Gunn's many suggestions for stream lining a wardrobe and cultivating one's own personal style, but the fact that on page two of this article he compares fashion to the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard.

Gunn writes:

"For Kierkegaard, a “classic” results when form and content meet in perfect harmony. In our case, the content is the person inside the garment; the form is the garment itself. Some form and content marriages are quite obvious. Examples that come to mind are Paris Hilton and the line Heatherette, or Audrey Hepburn and Givenchy."

Fashion can be an intellectual pursuit, and I think Gunn proves this well by paring his Kierkegaard with Givenchy. Like Audrey Hepburn's character in Funny Face, there is a place in the fashion world for bookish intellectuals.

Thank you, Tim Gunn! Will you be my life coach?

Gonna take pollution down to zero.

I love Captain Planet. I really do. The girls from WETT and I spend a good deal of time yesterday talking about how early 90s cartoons indoctrinated us into a variety of forms of environmental action, and how that is the current purpose of a film like Happy Feet. (Which also has a lot of other things going on in it that I will not discuss now.) We learned to save the rainforests and not create toxic smog (which would ultimately be voiced by Tim Curry) from Ferngully: The Last Rainforest and those messages were further reinforced by Captain Planet.

Until last night, though, I have been in error about one crucial part of my CP knowledge. I always believe that the coolest part of the show was the fact that the American kid was wheelchair-bound. I thought it was an interesting statement on the political mobility of our country, being somewhat in-stasis in regards to environmental issues. I also recalled that the wheelchair-bound American kid was somewhat cruelly named "Wheeler."

I brought up these facts--my Captain Planet Wheeler facts--last night. And I was met with blank stares.

"Was not the American kid in a wheelchair? And was he not, in fact, named Wheeler?" I ask.

"Are you thinking of the kid from the Burger King Kids Club?" That's the response I get.

Somehow, over the years, I have managed to conflate the image of fully-mobile, American, red-headed "Fire"-power Planeteer Wheeler:

with this auburn-haired, jean jacket-wearing parapalegic kid who is, in fact, very cruelly nicknamed "Wheels:"


I guess this is because I ate Burger King a lot as a kid, or, as Cassie informs me, those BK Kids Club commercials usually ran during Saturday morning cartoons. Thus, it would be really easy for me to conflate the able, fire-producing body of one man associated with wheels to the disabled, burger-ingesting body of another. I checked out the article on Captain Planet and on the Planeteers on Wikipedia today to be certain that, at the very least, my fiery American kid was at least named "Wheeler." He was. So I'm half right.

Frankly, my version of the Wheeler from Captain Planet is a lot more interesting. I guess it does make a lot of sense, though, that a red-headed American boy from Brooklyn (who acquired his power ring in an incident related to a mugging) with a temper would be given the power of fire.

What might be even more interesting, though, is that the real Wheeler, not my imagined Wheeler, doesn't seem to be interested in things with wheels at all. His favorite activity, according to the Captain Planet junkies on Wikipedia, is windsurfing.

Edit as of 8 PM: I am even more confused as to why someone--even an imaginary unseen cartoon parent--would name their son Wheeler, as Wikipedia seems to indicate that Wheeler's full name is Wheeler Sloane. Now, if those names were reversed and he were Sloane Wheeler I would find that believable, but not given who Planeteer Wheeler actually is. You know, from Brooklyn. Not the Upper East Side.