Anti-Oppression 101 Reading Recs?
The +1 has an internship at a research program that focuses on labor and gender issues, and wants to familiarize himself with the ideas, terminology, and basic works of the field. I was so excited when he said, “What feminist books would you recommend? I want to read them this summer,” you have no idea. He’s committed to social justice, he acts on his ideals, and he wants to educate himself–he’s a perfect ally, and he cares so much. He’s marvelous, and I love him for it.
*ahem* Got distracted there for a minute from the point of the post, which was to ask y’all what books you’d recommend for 101-style anti-oppression reading. We’ve got a book club of two, essentially, and we’re starting with Backlash and then Whipping Girl, and I’d also like to read some bell hooks this summer. I’m looking for books on feminism, queer theory, trans rights, anti-racism, classism, and disability activism. Ideally, they would be intersectional, or at least operate that way when read in conjunction with one another. What do you suggest?
Home-Made Beverages
For all y’all beer/liquor/home cooking/vintage cookbook enthusiasts out there, here’s a PDF of Home-Made Beverages, an anonymous book by A Practical Brewer, published in 1919. It has recipes for beer, cordial, liqueur, and many alcoholic liquids. The PDF I’ve uploaded is a scan of a copy of a faded booklet from 1919, so while it’s legible, it’s less than crisp and clear. Right-click, save as, and wait for it to finish downloading– the file is 137 MB.
GOOD RIDDANCE TO BAD RUBBISH
GOODBYE FUCKER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MAY THE DOOR OF PROSECUTION FOR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY HIT YOU AND ALL YOUR ADMINISTRATION CRONIES ON THE WAY OUT!!!
Meme: Literary Personals
Idea via tarigwaemir:
While we were cooking, Steve and I listened to the recording of La bohème (Callas as Mimì, di Stefano as Rodolfo, orchestra and chorus of la Scala) because we had tickets to the SFO production on Saturday, and I wanted to familiarize him with the opera. I showed him the libretto for Mimì’s famous aria, “Sì, mi chiamano Mimì”, and he remarked that it sounded like a Craigslist personal ad.So…we made a Craigslist listing in the Casual Encounters section:
Subject: I like poets
They call me Mimì, but my name is Lucia. I live all by myself and I eat alone. I’m French (but I like to sing in Italian) and I’m prone to coughing.
Age: young but legal (I think)
Occupation: seamstress
Likes: things that have gentle magic, love, spring, dreams and fancies, poetry, praying (but not going to church), the sun’s first rays, April’s first kiss
Hobbies: embroidery, making silk flowers (that have no scent)
What I’m looking for: Someone who writes and lives in happy poverty. You don’t have to have a lot of money as long as you’re a millionaire in spirit.
Rules:
1. Choose a character.
2. Make a Craigslist personal post from that character’s POV.
3. Post a link in your blog.
4. Post any responses if the person gets the joke!
Alas, I haven’t gone through the CL postings in a while, and so I missed the opportunity to respond to tarigwaemir’s via email. But here’s late-20s man seeking wife:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. I am a single man with an income of £10,000 a year (~$15k U.S. at the current exchange rate, not adjusted for inflation). I consider myself handsome and intelligent, but some people think that I am overly proud and disagreeable. They are idiots.
My parents are deceased and I’m the guardian of my younger sister, who is dear to me. A former friend of mine–we’ll call him W–once attempted to elope with her. This is why he is a FORMER friend. Don’t mess with my family and friends, because I will protect them.
I enjoy horseback riding, dancing, and walking around on my estate, which is quite sizable and well maintained. I have a manor house and treat my staff very well. I do not enjoy tiresome balls at small estates in the country.
I’m looking for a woman of good family, someone who is handsome and not merely tolerable. She should be pretty and have fine eyes.
Miscellany
I’ve been working on some labor-intensive projects lately and so haven’t been around much. Then I took this past weekend to be away from the internet almost entirely, aside from checking in on email and reading The French Laundry At Home in conjunction with reading TFL Cookbook. I’ve been reading a lot of cookbooks and cooking-related books this past week as a sort of escapism and an antidote to the project-related stress. Unfortunately, the projects look to be kicking up again in the next few weeks.
Good: Went to see L’Elisir d’Amore again on Sunday because I wanted to see Ramon Vargas again and hear “Una Furtiva Lagrima,” his big aria in Act II.
Bad: Ramon Vargas was out sick and Adler Fellow Alek Shrader was subbing for him.
Good: Alek Shrader has a beautiful tenor voice, a charming stage presence, and despite a tendency to overdo the vibrato at the beginning, did a wonderful job as Nemorino. “Una Furtiva Lagrima” was tender and warm and Shrader was great as an awkward, naive Nemorino. Vargas played up the comic side and was utterly charming, but I also liked Shrader’s more subtle approach.
Bad: the three little kids in front of me that thought it was appropriate to stand up, whisper, and eat candy out of noisy cellophane bags during the show.
Good: The little kids shut up when I got completely fed up with them and said, “Shhh!” after they started talking during the middle of “Una Furtiva Lagrima.”.
Bad: They started talking again after the aria was over.
Bad: Their parents also thought it was appropriate to whisper and eat candy out of noisy cellophane bags during the show.
Angry: People who go to the opera to talk during the opera should not go. I understand that they want to take their kids and give them a treat or god knows what–but the opera does productions specifically “for Families” every year. If they can’t make those or want to go to the full-length show, then they should make their kids behave. If kids cannot sit down and shut up for two and a half hours, they should not be at the opera because they are spoiling it for everyone sitting within earshot of them.
Good: I spent the past weekend reading Ruhlman’s books, The Soul of a Chef and The Reach of a Chef, and learned that the kitchens at the French Laundry and Per Se are extraordinarily clean for restaurant kitchens. They’re spic and span, they’re so clean that Keller can walk around in socks without stepping into any spills or sticky spots. In a restaurant kitchen! According to Ruhlman, this is because Keller is a stickler about cleanliness and perfection and doing a job correctly and without mess because mess means waste.
Bad: I read this and immediately thought, “If they can do this in a restaurant kitchen, I can do it in my kitchen!” This is reason #1 why I would be a terrible person to live with. I like my apartment clean and neat in very specific ways, and it bothers me when it’s not.
Good: Kitchen is now clean, with counters and stove scrubbed, floor swept, pots and pans thoroughly cleaned and scrubbed free of burned-on oil coats, and knives sharpened.
Bad: Still haven’t scrubbed the floor.
Good: Have successfully maintained the rituals and high levels of cleanliness for three and a half whole days.
Good: I have comp tickets to the Adler Fellow Gala Concert.
Good: Ji Young Yang, who has a voice like silver bells, and Alek Shrader are singing scenes from Semele together.
Good: Heidi Melton, Andrew Bidlack (excellent as the Fool in Boris Godunov this year), and Kenneth Kellogg!
Protest8SF: Prop. 8 Protest 11/15, 10:30 A.M. City Hall
JoinTheImpact (their servers have been overloaded, so the site might be down) is organizing a national day of GLBTQI rights protests: Saturday, Nov. 15, 10:30 A.M. Pacific / 1:30 P.M. Eastern at your city hall. There’s quite a long list of protests at the site and lots of people are stepping up to organize protests in various cities and states across the nation. Check it out – there might already be a protest in your city and if there’s not, you can start one! I think this could be really powerful. The anger and energy coming out of the GLBTQI + allies community is astounding and although it’s in immediate reaction to the anti-marriage equality bans, we can make it much bigger than that: marriage equality, a fully inclusive ENDA, a GLBTQI hate crimes act (that absolutely must include transpeople, since they are so often the victims of vicious violence that is ignored or turned into joke fodder), the repeal of DADT, insert your hopes and dreams here. This movement is our movement: yours and mine and everyone else’s. This is a big grassroots movement and grassroots movements are led by ordinary citizens-turned-activists that grab megaphones and take a step forward, leading everyone else with them.
As Redstar points out, one of the side effects of the Obama campaign and, indeed, the many political campaigns that just concluded is that there are now thousands, if not millions of people that are trained in grassroots organizing. There are people that know what a campaign needs, people that know how to organize people, people that know how to organize events, people that know how to organize publicity, people that know how to phonebank and distribute fliers and spread publicity online and go door to door and fundraise. All of these people can take their skills and turn them to social justice and civil rights causes. I got my training from recruiting volunteers in person and phonebanking for the No on 4 and No on 8 campaigns and seeing how they organized their statewide and local strategy. The Yes on K campaign did an amazing job of building coalitions with local political parties, clubs, social justice causes, reaching out to minority communities, and getting their message out in local, national, and alternative media. Years ago, I managed online and offline publicity for a nonprofit cause. I can use these tools and experiences and so can the many people that got their first tastes of activism in this election cycle. The question is how to harness their energy, knowledge, and experience for social justice causes? Personally, I’d like to get more involved in the immigrant rights movement and I’ll have to look into that. But I digress.
In my own fabulous city of SF, on Friday night there was a great, spontaneous, grassroots & netroots march from Hallidie Plaza through the Castro to Dolores Park and then back to the steps of City Hall, where drag queen Pollo Del Mar spoke and charged everyone present to go back into their communities and spread the word. I have lots of great pictures from the march and I’ll put them up sooner or later. Probably later and probably on Picasa or flickr – uploading a lot of photos to WordPress is both timeconsuming and annoying.
Upcoming protests: I mentioned JoinTheImpact at the beginning of this post, and I’ll end with them. There is a JTI protest scheduled for 11/15, 10:30 A.M. at San Francisco City Hall (google map address). The folks at Protest8SF.wordpress.com are working on organizing it: they have a preliminary to do list, fliers for publicity, and a googlegroups list serv that anyone can join to help with the organizing. If you’re in SF, check out the website to see if you can help and definitely come to the rally! If you’re not in SF, please pass the links along and spread the word.
Web organizing techniques + community organizing techniques + campaign techniques = much easier to organize social justice movements? Y/N? I’ll have to think about this.
ETA: thatonegaykid says that there is a JoinTheImpact protest 11/15 in Orange County, 1 P.M. at Irvine City Hall. Please get in touch with her (thatonegaykid.wordpress.com)to find out more!
Small Moments
In the midst of it all, there are small moments that make me laugh or smile and remember that I’m here and that I will not lie down and die, goddamnit. Those small moments are usually political, such as this conversation I had while phonebanking for No on Prop. 4:
Voter: I’m 53–
PD: thinks, “Oh, shit,” because, “I’m [age],” is usually followed by, “so [Prop. 4] doesn’t matter to me.”
Voter: –and when I was 15, Planned Parenthood saved my life. They were there for me when I needed help. So I’ll vote no on Prop. 4!
Then there are the non-political moments that nevertheless remind me why I fell in love with my friends to begin with and why life is worth living wholeheartedly and fighting for.
Via text message:
PD: L’Elisir d’Amore was too delightful!
M: Did it elicit un furtiva lagrima?
PD: ILU! [Short, of course, for "I love you"]
The silly jokes, the bright sparks of wit, the shared love of music and opera–that’s part of why I fell in love to begin with, and these brief respites recharge my spirit all out of proportion to their brevity.
L’Elisir d’Amore genuinely was excellent. Ramon Vargas (Nemorino), Inva Mula (Adina), and Ji Young Yang (Giannetta) were spectacular! It took me a while to warm up to Vargas and Mula, but they did a fantastic job and had great chemistry. Vargas in particular was good at acting as well as singing. I would love to hear more of Yang’s delicate, fragile soprano and am thinking of going to L’Elisir d’Amore for Families, when she’ll be singing Adina. The more I hear her, the more I like her–I was lukewarm about her performance as the Rose (The Little Prince) last May, didn’t particularly notice her as Juliette (Die Tote Stadt), was entranced by her aria as Xenia (Boris Godunov) last week, and thoroughly enjoyed her turn as Giannetta tonight. She has a distinctive voice that stood out even during chorus pieces, once I knew what to listen for. Like birdsong or high, silver bells.
Random Silliness: 8 Homes
Renee tagged me for random weekend silliness, which was sorely needed this past weekend (I cannot wait for the election to be here, counted, certified, and over). Er, so much so that I didn’t actually get to it until the weekend was over. But Monday is a good day for random silliness, right?
Where Would Your 8 Homes Be?
List them. You don’t have to list your reasons, but if you do at least for a few of them, it would be more fun. And remember that the only rule is: the homes must be within the borders of the United States of America or else, within the borders of the country you live in, so as to utterly emulate the McCains. When you’re done, tag 8 people, so that they may join in the self-indulgence, forgetting about the crappy property market and the equivalent of The End of Pompeii on Wall-Street. You could spend your time hammering your doors and windows shut in preparation for the apocalypse instead, but it would be much less fun.
The John McCain meme was actually more difficult than I thought it would be, because most of the places I’d want to live are either abroad or where I’m currently living.
1. San Francisco, CA. I love SF, possibly more than any place I’ve ever lived before. I love the liberal culture, the activism, the street fairs, the weather, the architecture, the SOLE restaurant culture, the farmers markets, the diversity, the opera, the symphony, the walks, the neighborhoods, etc.
2. Boston, MA. I have friends there, which is the primary draw. That and the Harvard Book Store.
3. Ashland, OR. I would like to go to the Shakespeare festival. We visited years ago and it was a very cute, walkable town, with lots of trees and plants. There was also a used bookstore and an ice cream shop.
4. Hardwick, VT. Well, I guess I wouldn’t just want a flat there, I’d want to live there and participate in the SOLE agriculture-based economic revival.
5. Somewhere around Tahoe, close enough to a lake to walk there. Swimming and bathing in a freshwater lake is refreshing and the air up there is amazingly clear. There are plants and wildlife everywhere and although it’s not silent, the distinct lack of electronic humming is soothing and relaxing.
6. Hippie town, NC. I forget what it’s called, but a friend used to live in this small town in NC that’s very liberal. He’d wait tables and save up some money, then take off to go camping until the cash ran out and then he’d wait tables again. Lots of environmentalists, potheads, musicians, and artists.
7. Washington, D.C. In order to more easily attend protests and demonstrations. Honestly, mostly because I’m running out of ideas. The museums are great and free and the WNO is decent.
8. Chicago, IL. It’d be nice to have somewhere to stop over on cross-country flights. I haven’t spent much time there, so it’d be nice to get to know the city.
I tag tarigwaemir and sahiya.
Some Welcome Humor
Yesterday, I thought that this blog snarkifying comments made by Prop. 8 supporters was the funniest thing I’d seen in ages.
I was wrong. This picture is the funniest thing I’ve seen in ages. McCain looks immature, undignified, and cretinous.
LizardOC’s snarky reframing of the “fundamental repugnance of the confidently bigoted” makes me laugh and provides some much-needed cheering up. I’m working hard and so are many other people, but sometimes, I’m so tired. I’m tired of constantly having to fight for rights and social justice, and I’m tired of encountering bigotry and hatred. It can be wearying. But it’s necessary and I will never stop. And so endurance and laughter are key to staying in for the long haul.
To quote the inimitable Molly Ivins,
As a life-long Texas liberal, I have spent the whole of my existence in a political climate well to the right of that being created by Ronald Reagan and his merry zealots. Brethren and sistren, this can not only be endured, it can be laughed at. Actually, you have two other choices. You could cry or you could throw up. But crying and throwing up are bad for you, so you might as well laugh. All you need in order to laugh about Reagan is a strong stomach. A tungsten tummy. – The Progressive, March 1986. p. 84 in Molly Ivins…Can She?
BRIAN KINNEY!!11!1!
After dealing with homophobes, there is something curiously consoling about watching early seasons of Queer as Folk and enjoying a TV show focused almost exclusively on gay and lesbian characters, their lives, their loves, and the homophobic challenges they face. Most importantly, it presents them as fully developed human characters. The show has many problems, most notably sexism and that there are no primary POC characters, but it still speaks to me. I love their friendships, their joy in each other. I love Brian and Justin!
I have another story for the “Conversations with a Homophobe” series (YAY, it’s a series now! WTF UGH.), but I’m phonebanking with No on Prop. 8 tomorrow so it’ll be up at some point TBD.
This post was prompted by the excellent Brian/Justin scene at the end of 1.18, where Justin’s thinking of going to Dartmouth and Brian shows that he really does pay attention to the things that matter and in his own inimitable way, he understands and cares for Justin. <3 <3 <3 <3 I love watching them when they’re together and in love with each other and it shows.
Think B4 You Speak: +, +/-
Plus: Following up on the last post, I poked around the ThinkB4YouSpeak site and the Ad Council’s site to see what the ads were like. Overall, the print ads (I haven’t looked at the vids) are well-executed: they’re simple, they’re to the point, and they challenge the viewer in unmistakable terms to consider what it means to use gay, dyke, and faggot as insults.
Read the rest of this entry »
Language Matters
Question: How much do I love this initiative and this article? NYT, 2008/10/08, Stuart Elliott, “A Push to Curb the Casual Use of Ugly Phrases”
FOR the first time since the Advertising Council was founded in 1942, the organization — which directs and coordinates public service campaigns on behalf of Madison Avenue and the media industry — is introducing ads meant to tackle a social issue of concern to gays and lesbians.
The campaign, which is scheduled to be announced by the council in Washington on Wednesday, will seek to discourage bullying and harassment of teenagers who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.The campaign, created pro bono by the New York office of Arnold Worldwide, urges an end to using derogatory language, particularly labeling anything deemed negative or unpleasant as “so gay.” That is underlined by the theme of the campaign: “When you say, ‘That’s so gay,’ do you realize what you say? Knock it off.” …
The campaign is on behalf of a nonprofit organization in New York called the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, or Glsen (pronounced glisten), which promotes tolerance among students. Glsen is spending about $2 million to develop and produce the campaign.
•
The introduction of the campaign will be accompanied by Glsen’s release of the 2007 edition of an annual report, the National School Climate Survey. The survey will report that 9 in 10 teenagers who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender said they were verbally harassed during the last school year. Almost half said they were also physically harassed because of their sexual orientation.
Answer: a lot. The article makes the argument that language matters, that the way you talk affects the way you think and the way you act. It makes that clear not once–
The campaign is “something I dreamed about for 10 years,” said Kevin Jennings, the founder and executive director at Glsen, and has been in active development for two years.“If you follow hateful language, you eventually get hurtful behavior,” he added. “The chain of events begins with kids learning it’s O.K. to disrespect people.”
–but twice:
Lynnette Schweimler, 17, a senior at Thunderridge High School in Highlands Ranch, Colo., said she hoped the campaign would “open people’s eyes a little bit.”Ms. Schweimler said that when she was attacked last year by assailants who singled her out for being a lesbian, “they used a lot of derogatory language.”
The repeating of such language “builds up intolerance,” she said, because “it’s used so often, people don’t understand the meaning of it.”
It makes the point that homophobic language, and by extrapolation, hate speech of any kind, is not innocent, is not “just a joke” or “just words.” Sticks and stones can break my bones and words can do just as much damage.
So the goal was “to show the situation in a new light,” Mr. Staffen said, “to point out this language can be hurtful and let the kids make their own decisions.”“Ultimately, we believe they will make the right decision,” he added.
Two students who were shown the ads to elicit their reactions praised the approach.
“These ads do a great job of making you stop and think,” said David Aponte, 16, a junior at Battlefield High School in Haymarket, Va., who described himself as a “straight ally” of Glsen and other organizations doing similar work. “I think people could connect to them,” he added. [emphasis mine]
The casual normalization of hate through homophobic language matters. It’s not a frivolous, meaningless exercise to avoid using homophobic, sexist, racist, ableist, classist, transphobic, and ageist language, it’s a real commitment to not endorsing hatred through using casual slurs. It’s awesome that Elliott wrote this article and didn’t once invoke the specter of “political correctness run amok;” I had to reread the article because I couldn’t believe it. Instead, he explored how hate speech does real harm to its victims, explaining through quotes and examples that the effect of verbally expressing hate is to endorse and build up homophobia. Even if you casually toss out gay as a synonym for bad, uncool, awful, gross, disgusting, wrong, etc., the effect is not innocuous: it hurts the GLBTQI people that hear it and it makes hatred acceptable to the speaker and the people that hear it.
If you’d like to send an email to the writer, contact him at stuart.elliott AT nytimes.com
Oxtail Soup
I’ve been doing a lot of cooking in the past couple of weeks (risotto alla salsiccia, lobster soup, baked pastas, cornbread muffins, and Earl Grey tea muffins, among other things), whether because the weather is (nominally, if not actually) changing and I cook more often in the fall and winter, or because I have more free time or what. Anyway, one of the things I tried last weekend was ggori gom tang, oxtail soup. The NYT published this recipe by Momofuku’s David Chang a while back, and I’d been meaning to try it ever since.
Now, the primary reasons that I don’t cook much Korean food are that I never learned from my mom and that I still haven’t found a good cookbook. When I do find a cookbook, I’ll flip through it and find that either (a) none of this stuff is what my mom makes or (b) that’s not how my mom makes it! Fail. Chang’s recipe falls into category (b), but I figured it was worth a shot, anyway. Even though it’s not how my mom makes gom tang, it’s a basis for experimentation. All bolding is mine.
Time: About 4 hours
2 1/2 pounds oxtails, trimmed and cut in 2 1/2-inch pieces
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 large onion, sliced thinly WTF? Onions? My mom doesn’t use onions.
1 sheet konbu (dried kelp, available in specialty food markets and health food stores) WTF? My mom doesn’t use konbu, either. Is this Korean?
1 large daikon radish, about 1 1/2 pounds, peeled and cut into 1-inch-thick rounds Ok, my mom used to use daikon (or some other tuber radish thing, they’re all called moo as far as I’m concerned).
1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce, or as needed
2 to 4 tablespoons thinly sliced scallions, for garnish
Cooked white rice for serving (optional) Optional?! Bap is not optional for gook! Half the point of making gook is so you can dump bap in it!
I decided to give the onion a try, since the scallions had tiny onion bulbs at their bases and I had some leftover onions. Passed on the konbu, because I didn’t have any on hand and regarded it with suspicion as an interloper, anyway. Passed on the daikon, because I don’t like it and always picked it out of the soup when I was little (hence my mom used to, but no longer does, use daikon in gook) – I thought about using it in to add flavor and then throwing it out, but that felt wasteful.
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Season oxtails liberally with salt and pepper and place in a roasting pan. Roast until golden brown, about 30 minutes. Transfer oxtails to a plate (do not turn off oven); add sliced onion to unwashed roasting pan. Roast onions until tender and golden, about 15 minutes. Allow onions to cool, then cover and refrigerate until needed; leave oxtails at room temperature. I don’t recall my mom roasting the oxtails, let alone roasting onions in the drippings, but it’s an excuse to use the roasting tray and it can’t hurt, right? The onions smelled delicious.
2. In a large casserole or stockpot, bring 10 cups water to a simmer. Add konbu and simmer for 4 minutes. Discard konbu and add 1 tablespoon salt and daikon. Simmer until daikon is tender but not falling apart, about 30 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, remove daikon and set aside. Add oxtails and simmer, covered, until tender, about 2 1/2 hours. Using a slotted spoon, remove oxtails to a sheet tray and cool, reserving liquid in pot. Turn off heat. I skipped the konbu and daikon, so basically I simmered the oxtails for two and a half hours. Brought back memories of my mom making soup and leaving the pot on the stove for hours.
3. Reserve some of the meatiest oxtails (one or two per serving) for presentation; cover and keep warm. Pick meat from remaining oxtails, discarding excess fat, and set meat aside. Um, yeah, no. I left the meat on the bone so that the bones would add flavor, and kept the fat in for the same reason.
4. Add roasted sliced onions to broth, bring to a boil and reduce by a third. Return oxtail meat and daikon to broth and heat through. Season to taste with soy sauce and black pepper. Ladle into bowls and garnish each with reserved oxtails and a sprinkle of scallions. If desired, serve with white rice. Forgot the soy sauce, oops, and used salt instead. If the broth tastes bland or dull, it’s not salted enough.
Yield: 2 to 4 servings. Depending on your appetite; this will make a hell of a lot more than four servings for me, especially as I’m diluting the soup with more water (see below). 10c of water made for a soup that was quite flavorful but too thick for me (Korean soups are usually quite thin until you dump the rice in.).
In the end, it tasted great. Not quite like how my mom makes it, but still good. The roasted onions added a tinge of distinctively cooked-onion-y sweetness and roasting the meat made the soup much, much darker in color than I expected, although that didn’t affect the flavor. It’s easy to make and once you have a big pot of it, you can eat it for days (perfect for a quick dinner after a long day). I think that next time, I’ll roast the meat but skip the onions (the sweetness was nice, but it’s not how I like my gom tang), and add extra scallions for their tangy taste, which acts as a nice counterpoint to the rich, meaty broth.
Miscellaneous note: the soup is very, very fatty. If that matters to you, you can trim the meat before roasting or chill the soup overnight and skim the fat off. I left all the fat on and didn’t bother with the skimming step. What I’m doing instead is saving the bones and chunks of fat and throwing them back into the soup pot with some more water, then simmering the soup so as to stretch the broth for as long as possible. The meat’s nice, sure, but my favorite part is eating rice in the broth. It’s rich, warm, and good, and feels like kitchen love. It’s also cheap.
Another note: when it cooled off, the soup congealed, due to the gelatin in the bones. It looked disgusting, but it turned back into a liquid after being heated up. I don’t recall that ever happening when my mom made soup, so perhaps it’s a function of the roasting or maybe she just used a higher proportion of water to meat.
Beautiful Surprises
One of the joys of SOLE produce:
I was shucking an ear of corn and found that little caterpillar nestled under the husks and silk. It was curled up at the top on a bare patch where it’d eaten away the kernels. A small, ordinary miracle in the middle of an urban apartment, a connection with the cycle of birth, growth, transformation, and death. A sign that this corn wasn’t grown with pesticides and herbicides harmful to the pests, the farm workers, everyone living near the farm, and the plant, animal, and human communities that would’ve been affected by the chemical runoff.
I tossed the hungry caterpillar out the window and into the yard, where it’ll hopefully have a well fed life and grow to be one of the moths that likes to zoom into my flat.
I Came Out…
…to my parents last weekend and it went surprisingly well!
I took the GRE this morning and mostly kicked its ass (ran out of time on the analytical writing sections; those scores are coming in two weeks, so I’ll see how I did then)! An incidental and unexpected benefit of blogging and participating in the blogosphere was that it made the analytical writing sections easy. The first essay presented two opinion statements and I had to write an essay about one. Taking a position on an opinion statement? A prompt and a blank text box on a computer screen? I am so there. The second question presented a short blurb and asked for an evaluation of its argumentation. Taking apart a poorly reasoned argument? A blank text box on a computer screen? I am so there.
I Want You…to Vote Yes On K
At Tony Labat’s I Want You project, sex worker, activist, and artist Sadie Lune (NSFW) took first place with her performance “I Want You”! Congrats!
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is pleased to present Tony Labat’s I WANT YOU, the latest installment in the newly launched program series Live Art at SFMOMA. Beginning on September 4, 2008, artist Tony Labat invites denizens of the Bay Area to make their own demands of the public. Riffing on the iconic “I Want You” army recruitment campaigns of World Wars I and II, he asks what you would do if you had only one minute to seize the voice of authority, to be the finger-pointing Uncle Sam. How would you fill in the rest? I Want You . . . to do what? And what if your demands were performed before and voted on by a live audience? – SFMOMA
The video of Ms. Lune’s winning performance is by activist, artist, and sex worker Scarlot Harlot. (Video is NSFW, and I’ll put up a transcript later.)
I thought it was a great performance. It touched on the reasons why people should vote yes on K in a direct and simple manner, and I think the simplicity of it provokes deeper thought. “I want you to be nice to sex workers” sounds simple on face, but it challenges the assumptions that many people have about sex workers as inferior, disposable human beings (how many dead hooker jokes have you heard?) or as people that don’t deserve the same justice and presumption of basic humanity and equality as non-sex workers. Why aren’t people nice to sex workers? Why shouldn’t they be? What does it mean to be nice to sex workers? By phrasing her desires in the language of ordinary concerns and leaving “Vote yes on Prop. K!” until the end, Lune made suggestions that seem like common sense (oh, being nice to sex workers – well, sure, why not?) and then tied them to political action. Ding ding ding, the light bulb goes off: Oh! That’s why Bayswan is pushing to pass K! She emphasized that politics is about real people and real concerns. How can you be nice to sex workers? Vote yes on K. Every measure and every law affects real people.
More on the I WANT YOU project and the other winners here. SFMOMA will print and put up posters of Lune’s slogan and those of the other winners all around the city prior to the elections. An awesome performance and awesome, free (well, paid for by SFMOMA) campaign advertising all at once!
The I WANT YOU project is interesting in that it repurposes an iconic piece of WWI- and WWII- era advertising to encourage people to speak up and insert their own voices into the public sphere. Rather than being on the receiving end of Uncle Sam’s demands and pointing finger, they get to speak back to him and say what they want. I like that and I like that the project responds to current political issues with art, then takes the results and puts them up around the city, injecting peoples’ voices into the public realm. Politics meets arts meets individuals speaking up and reclaiming politics through art.
Love, Honor, Cherish: Jay and Van on Proposition 8
While poking around YouTube’s suggestions of clips related to No on Prop. 8′s ad, I found one by Love Honor Cherish, an LA-based grassroots organization campaigning against Prop. 8. A quick skim of their YouTube homepage showed that their ads feature straight couples, gay couples, relatives, politicians, young people, old people, people of various ethnic backgrounds, and an ad in Spanish. No lesbian couples yet, though. I like their approach, which is generally direct and states that yes, GLBTQI are human beings and therefore deserving of rights, rather than that GLBTQI are humans, too, won’t you please give us our rights? The difference between the two approaches is that one positions GLBTQI people as human beings without positioning GLBTQI people or heterosexual people as the norm, and the other positions heterosexual people as the norm and seeks to slip GLBTQI people into that category as an addition.
I like this ad because it features gay men speaking for themselves; it features an interracial couple; it features two POC. The gay men speaking for themselves aspect is important to me because it states that GLBTQI people deserve these rights simply by virtue of being human and they don’t need a heterosexual messenger to appeal to society at large on their behalf. There’s dignity in that approach and the underlying message is that GLBTQI people are here and we will not disappear. We will not be silenced.
The ad addresses the question, “Aren’t domestic partnerships enough?” and acknowledges the emotional and cultural trappings of marriage. Domestic partnerships are not the same as marriage in terms of the legal benefits; although they might be the same on paper in terms of state-granted rights in California, in their execution, they are often not. Many laws, rules, and regulations say “spouse” rather than “domestic partner,” and many federal rights and benefits do not necessarily apply to domestic partners. Leaving all that aside, however, there’s the simple reality that the modern incarnation of marriage carries certain social and emotional connotations that domestic partnerships and civil unions do not. It’s something emotional and therefore difficult to explain, but Jay makes the point quite effectively: “I couldn’t tell you how I asked him, “If you want to be a domestic partner?” But believe me, I can tell you how I proposed to him.”
Seasonality: A Panegyric to Tomatoes. And Oranges. And Peaches. And Pomegranates. And Green Garlic and Persimmons and Clementines…
This summer, I didn’t cook as much as I did last winter. I’m not too surprised, since during the summer I tend to want bread and fruit rather than cooked produce, but I’m a little sad because the bounty of spring and summer will soon pass. Last year, my last fresh tomato was in November, because I picked it up at a farmers market in SoCal when I was down south for the weekend (talk about food miles!) and I made penne all’ arrabbiata with it. Most likely, the last of the fresh tomatoes will be at the end of October, less than a month and a half away. I think about that and regret every week that I didn’t cook fresh sauces and celebrate the vibrancy and flavor of fresh tomatoes. Then I remember that in March, April, and May, I ate tomatoes by the (cooked) pound, thrilled at the extra dimensions of taste they added to spaghetti all’ amatriciana.
Hello, World! And Some Photos
Hey there, y’all! I’m still here, still alive. It’s just been a topsy turvy couple of months and then I was completely away from internet access last week (to say nothing of connectivity troubles with the modem and the wireless router throughout May and June).
I’m working on some stuff at the moment for H1K and generally trying to get back in the swing of things reading blogs and the news. In the meantime, have some pictures below the cut. -posts and flees-
Congratulations!
Congratulations to M! Best to you always, cher. 
Congratulations to the same-sex couples all over California who are getting married starting this week! In my own wonderful city, the county clerk’s office is staying open late today so that Mayor Newsom can marry “Lesbian rights pioneers Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, together for more than half a century” (SF Chronicle, 2008/06/16)today after the technical close of business on June 16, and therefore as soon as possible according to the May 15th ruling by the State Supreme Court. That kind of enthusiasm for equality and for affirming love is heartwarming. Other counties’ hours are listed here in the SF Chron.
SF Chronicle, Wyatt Buchanan, 2008/06/16 “Same-sex marriage plans around the Bay Area”
SF Chronicle, Rachel Gordon, 2008/06/16 “Lesbian pioneer activists see wish fulfilled”
