Saturday Soprano Blogging

Of the many reasons I enjoy being alive--young gentlemen, good weed, shallots and vinegar--the Saturday Met broadcasts figure in an important supporting role. I mean, Adriana Lecouverer!

Here is the marvelous Joan Sutherland in a marvelously ridiculous hat singing "Io son l'umile ancella":

Michael Steele Revises the GOP Platform to Get Jiggy Wit It

Yaw yaw
bitchz say we eerelevant
but i drop lock
hot like a elephant
flip reaganz
and expresidents
filibust communist experiments
keep tight
fly light
pick fights wit terrerists
osama muthafucka
yaw know ya cant handle dis
black ops gangsta
im in ya cave
wit my nine
like a dick in a pussy
but no faggots
sanctified
ya'll progress niggaz
try steal ma ride
but i'm a coup d'état nigga
deep on da inside.

Foodie Friday - Dinner Party Menu

I know I just posted a chicken recipe, but whatevs. Poultry is the good cook's most useful canvas, and I like the fact that a menu like the one below, which I made for a small dinner with friends last week, lets the home cook utilize nearly the whole animal without waste. Rather than listing recipe instructions separately, I'll try to run through the process from beginning to end, because after learning how to taste and smell, a good cook must learn how to manage time and keep his wits. All together, the following menu took about 2 hours to prepare, beginning around 7:00 PM, with the soup course served at 9:00 PM

Poulet à la diable, Brussels sprouts, grated carrot salad, warm potato and radish soup

for the chicken

1 approx 4 lb. chicken, neck and innards reserved for soup(see below)
several tablespoons of Dijon mustard
2-3 fresh chili peppers (cayenne, preferably), finely chopped
1/4 cup unbleached flower
1 egg
1/4 cup chicken stock (see below)
fine sea salt

for the sprouts

approx 1 lb. of Brussels sprouts, halved
5-6 large garlic cloves, peeled and crushed with the flat side of a knife
butter
fine sea salt

for the carrot salad

3-4 large juicing carrots, grated (not too fine)
4-5 freshly crushed cardamom pods
2-3 medium shallots, finely diced
cider vinegar
extra virgin olive oil
fine sea salt
a somewhat light, slightly crumbly blue cheese, such as Mountain Gorgonzola

for the stock

reserved chicken neck and organs (see above), except the liver, which is to reserve
reserved chicken spine (see below)
4 chicken feet (Chinese grocery!)
1 yellow onion, quartered
1 large carrot, cut into chunks
2 bay leaves
water
sea salt

for the rest of the soup

4 medium russet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2" cubes
1 medium daikon radish, peeled and cut into 1/2" cubes
a pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
a pinch of freshly ground cumin
1 clove
4-5 fresh sage leaves, chopped
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
fine sea salt (to taste)
1 chicken liver
1/4 cup unbleached flower
a pinch of ground cayenne pepper
clarified butter

First quarter the chicken with a large knife. I use a good Chinese cleaver for more or less all of my cooking, from fine chopping to butchering to peeling. Split the bird's breast and lay it open. Cut along either side of the spine--you may need to give the knife a whack or two to crack through the ribs. Remove and reserve the spine. Halve each half by cutting at a slight angle toward the tail, beginning just above the drumstick joint. Set the chicken parts aside to air dry.

Preheat the oven to 350 F.

In a stockpot, combine the chicken innards (except the liver), the neck, the reserved spine, and all the other ingredients listed under for the stock, filling the pot to a little more than 3/4 volume with water. Bring to a boil. Skim off any gunk on top. Reduce heat, and simmer briskly, partially covered, for about an hour, until it appears golden and the smell of chicken soup fills the kitchen.

Meanwhile peel and prepare the other items for the soup (up to the final four, which are for preparation of a liver garnish and are the last thing you'll cook. Put them into a smaller pot--they should fill about half its volume--and set aside.

Prepare the carrot salad. Combine the shallots and cardamom with a pinch of salt and just enough cider vinegar to cover them thoroughly. Let steep for 15-20 minutes to remove the pungency of the shallots. Then whisk together with several generous tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil and toss with the grated carrots. Do not add the cheese--that will occur just before serving. Cover with plastic wrap and allow to stand at room temperature, letting the flavors mix and mellow.

Prepare the dressing for the chicken. In a large bowl, wish together the mustard, flour, pepper, egg, stock, and salt until it forms a smooth, batter-like consistency.

Generously butter the bottom of a shallow ceramic baking dish. Place the Brussels sprouts cut side down in the pan. Lay the quarters of the chicken on top, skin side up. Generously brush all the exposed chicken surface with the mustard mixture. Place in the oven and bake at 350 for approximately 1/2 hr.

While the chicken bakes, finish the soup. Strain broth through a few layer of cheese cloth (or a semi-damp paper towel laid in a colander will do in a pinch) over the potato-radish mixture, filling the pot about 3/4 of the way. Bring to a boil. Boil together vigorously until the potatoes break up in the tines of a fork. Remove from heat. Purée in a blender, in several batches if necessary. Salt to taste. Return to the stove and keep warm over low heat, stirring occasionally for several minutes to even the consistency.

Now it's time for it all to come together. Increase the heat on the oven to 400 F for 10-15 minutes; the chicken will develop a beautiful golden crust. Just before the chicken is done, melt a tablespoon of clarified butter in a small frying pan. Dredge the liver in a mixture of flower, cayenne, and a bit of salt. Place in the pan and sear on both sides, preserving a bit of rareness at the center. Remove to a paper towel.

Take the chicken out of the oven and let stand on the warm stove top while you serve the soup course.

Ladle the soup into shallow bowls. Slice the liver into thin strips and garnish each bowl. Add a little additional cracked pepper if you like. Serve.

The soup course will give the chicken time to stand and for the juices to settle. Plate the carrot salad, Brussels sprouts, and chicken individually. Serve.

Raindrops Keep Fallin on My Head

Rob Blagojevich is still the most powerful man in America from beyond the grave, and although Roland Burris is now faced with a damning array of meteorological headline-metaphors, it remains worthwhile to point out that no one has proven that his Ascended Master, Blago, did anything illegal.

La Cage Aux Folles

Consider this headline:

Hoover investigated rumors that Valenti was gay

Oh my God Tony Kushner you hit PUBLISH too soon!

I Will Fight No More Forever

It cannot be emphasized enough that those who are arguing against criminal investigations for Bush officials are -- whether consciously or implicitly -- arguing that the U.S., alone in the world, is exempt from the laws and principles which we've been advocating and imposing on other countries for decades. There is simply no way to argue that our leaders should be immunized from criminal investigations for torture and other war crimes without believing that (a) the U.S. is and should be immune from the principles we've long demanded other nations obey and (b) we are free to ignore our treaty obligations any time it suits us.

It's just as simple as that: one must embrace both of those premises in order to argue for a bar against criminal investigations.

-Glenn Greenwald

Well, Mr. President, I would say that General Ripper has already invalidated that policy.

-Air Force General Buck Turgidson

God Bless You, Professor Chomsky. I think it's fair to say that both (a) and (b) from Glenn's above-quoted post have long been US policy, premises. Just ask these picturesque Lakota Sioux!



I mean, yes: it is the practice and de facto policy of the United States to impose obligations on others by which terms of mutuality the US itself does not abide. This is not new, and it will persist until America's power relative to other nations decreases sufficiently to make treaty obligations . . . obligatory. Well on our way, one hopes.

It is, however, worth remembering that this nation, these United States, was created by the most successfully prosecuted series of genocides in history, against which the Turks or Germans appear as mere amateurs, despite the bigger numbers. Our forefathers didn't attempt to eradicate one people or one nation from the Earth; they did eradicate many nations and many peoples from the Earth, from one end of a continent to the other. So let us not wring our hands too long over our traduced values and traditions. Ever thus to deadbeats.

Cosmetology

I got some kind of callus thingamajig on my leg and went to the dermatologist, and she was somehow unmoved by my injunction to "just cut the little motherfucker off" and was all like, "Well, the responsible thing to do is take a biopsy, just to be sure," blah blah, and even though I said, "No, seriously, just get out the liquid nitrogen and freeze the bastard and cut him the fuck off and give me a lollipop on the way out the door," she went ahead and scooped a chunk out and sent it off and now on the good side: stitches! Only three, but I have never actually had stitches, not once, in my entire life to this point. Doublegood side: little black stitches in my skin are cool as fuck. Doubleplusungood side: itches; like; hell. It takes all my yogic calm to keep from scratching. They should've given me one of those paper cones for my head. Anyway, point: sometimes it pays to just leave the bitch alone.

As we move into round three of this bout with The Economy, I find myself at once annoyed by the various subnumerate GOPsters proclaiming that The Economy will heal itself like The Wolverine if only we leave it alone, or just get rid of taxes, or some such, while at the same time grudgingly respecting the poor dears as they raise a minor ruckus, easily brushed aside, against the screaming necessity of SomethingMustBeDone. "The Stimulus Will Pay for Itself!" You gotta spend money to make money, right? (Well, you have to spend less money than you return in revenue, but who's, uh, counting?) How it will pay for pay for itself seems to be an equally fanciful conviction that the so-called multiplier effect functions like endless cell division, two for every one, onward to eternity, inshallah. But since vast heaps of stimulating monies are being burned on the institutional pyres of failed banks, bundled mortgages, unrealizable debt obligations, and other toobigtofail remnants of the go-go years, an honest observer, even if she truly believes the Keynesian catechism, must admit to her model a degree of countermanding waste.

Tales from Ohio

I am so tickled to see dowdy Yale once more lagging behind my own Ohioan alma mater in hippydippyism. Ah, Oberlin. The motto remains "Learning and Labor," but in the years since I left has been supplanted by the more aggressively interrogatory, "Think one person can change the world?" I mean, sure. Look at Hitler! I do not believe it wise to allow a question to function as a slogan. Why not just: "One person can change the world." There. A statement of principle. Learning and Labor worked well, even if the latter noun was a distant holdover from the more austere days of Methodist education, before the vegans took over and started teaching courses on Gilmore Girls in the ExCo. One also fondly recalls parents' weekends, wherein one saw all one's favorite be-beaded ragamuffins ducking ashamedly into the back seats of E- and S-Classes. Oberlin was the first place I ever felt the twinge of poverty. After all, daddy only drove an M3.

Anyway, in those halcyon days of my not-so-distant youth, Oberlin was embroiled in precisely this controversy: whether or not to allow coed cohabitation in on-campus housing. This was a school with co-ed bathrooms, keep in mind, and in freshman year my home-dorm of Burton, infamous on campus for retaining the un-stalled, open showers of an earlier, more innocent era, even had some unofficially co-ed bathing facilities. But this sort of thing was merely tolerated, as opposed to actually endorsed, and for the college to officially recognize opposite-sex roommate pairings in the dormitories was a step too far for the maligned office of ResLife.

Oh, the protest we raised. At the time, our logic seemed thoroughly impeccable, impervious to counterargument. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems less logical, but altogether more hilarious. Our argument was honed to a fine point: we're all fags already! Opposite-sex roommates would decrease the likelihood of fucking and other such complicating behaviors. We even had a ready-made scandale, a pair of fag boyfriends who'd roomed together freshman year and ever thereafter, one a handsome square-jawed actor type, the other a darling, twinky little thing who, although evidently an inveterate bottom, allegedly had the biggest cock on campus. I was never able to ascertain the truth or falsity of this personally, and it remains one of the great demerits in a sex life self-prided on uniform success.

But the ResLife Hobbits® remained thoroughly unmoved, and student resistance frittered out quickly, for although we had justice on our side, ResLife had a more potent weapon, by which I mean the Large, Implacable Black Woman, against whose skeptically musical mmm-hmmms no white kid, no matter how many times she's clutched at the ragged, talismanic, totemic phrase "person of color," no matter how much bell hooks she's crammed into her lesbionic brain, can muster a convincing reply. And so we beat back, boats against a current, borne ceaselessly . . . In fact, we sucked it up, so to speak, and connived to move off-campus as soon as possible, and turned our attention to more important sorts of activism, like which doctor friend of daddy's could write a medical note and get us off the dining plan.

Futility Is the Mother of Humility

Overall, morons like Tweety who purport to be be pros with his fluffer Howard Fineman miss the fundamental dynamic with this pseudo intellectual exercise. Tweety suddenly blurts he’s mystified how ‘liberals’ made this ranking. Fineman gushes his number one president would be JFK. Allowing these people more air time is crime against the future.

-The Stiftung Leo Strauss

If, as Antonio avers, what's past is prologue, then I'm tempted to propose that the present is invariably a crime against the future. Of the list of Big Men reproduced at the other end of the above-linked Strauss piece, I don't just this to say. In my un-humble opinion, Washington was the only good President; ever thus a decline. Kennedy and Wilson were two of the greatest tragic blunderers in American history, the latter a vicious racist who got us involved in a European war, the former a horn-dog ratfucker with a third-rate intellect. Ho Chi Minh reportedly said that he couldn't conceive that America could be so stupid upon the news of Ngo Dinh Diem's death. I suspect that if he uttered it, he did so with inscrutable irony.

Reagan? Truman? America's self-infatuated mythos isn't really so unique among nations, but our genuine attachment to mediocrity is. I recall when Reagan's journals were put out and almost the whole of our official culture stood back and proclaimed that the myth of the unthinking actor could now be put firmly to rest. Here was a man with opinions, not pausing to note just how shallow and inconsequential these opinions actually were. The mere fact of their topicality was taken to indicate intellectual rigor of some sort or other. Truman was a party hack who inherited an already-won war. Of TR, Gore Vidal memorably opined, "Give a sissy a gun and he will kill everything in sight." If the Menckenian logic is to be believed, it was Calvin Coolidge who provided the model of a president. By doing almost nothing, he did almost nothing wrong.

Overlapping Sets

So, yeah:

Why does SNL understand the Republican Party better than the media?

The Screwed Urbanism

David Brooks gets confused about the concept of popularity. Hilarity ensues.

Meanwhile, predictions of the revitalization of urban cores are less about taste than necessity. I don't think that far-flung exurbanites in 4,000 sq. ft. McHouses particularly want to move to nearer communities; I just suspect that economic circumstances will eventually give them no choice. Gas prices are already inching back up, despite the continued decline of the broader economy. The financing options that allowed so many white-collar workers of moderate income to buy too-large, too-expensive homes are dead. Also, the white-collar workers are all going to lose their jobs. Meanwhile, Denver, one of Brooks' exemplar Western pseudo-cities, has the seventh (or so) highest foreclosure rate in the nation. Orlando, Tampa, San Diego, Austin, Phoenix . . . all within the top (bottom) twenty-five or so metro areas by this measure. The only city mentioned without a major problem is Seattle, whose presence in Brooks' list is almost inexplicable, since Seattle is a more traditional Eastern-European city with a strong, populated urban core, mass transit, and so on . . . a city that along with its dyke sister Portland is perhaps as close as America gets to reviled Amsterdam.

Oh My God She's Gone Totally Sane!!!!!!

Here is an article in which Christopher Hitchens warns, "For decades, we have wondered what might happen when or if an apocalyptic weapon came into the hands of a messianic group or irrational regime. We are surely now quite close to finding out." More or less par for the course, no? Except: he goes on, beginning with the very next sentence, to lay out a perfectly cogent argument for what would happen when or if such weapon came into the hands of said group, an argument for their behaving fully rationally.

He then proposes that the real danger of a nuclear-armed Iran would be the possible annexation of Bahrain, against which the would would have no recourse, as Iran could now engage in "nuclear blackmail." Among possibilities not entertained: that Iran wishes to deter the United States from military aggression. Cf. Iraq, Afghanistan, which in addition to sharing the unenviable quality of being targets for America's goofy martial ire happen to sit on either side of Iran. Cannon to the left of me, cannon to the right.

Also unexamined: the possibility that Iran is not in fact pursuing nuclear armaments.

HahaSarahPalinHaha

Dear The Internets,

Saturday Night Live is not now, nor has it ever been, funny.

Seriously,
IOZ

KaBoom

I have been furiously masturbating over sigils composed of the deconstructed letters of Alan Moore's name in a vain effort to make Zack Snyder's Watchmen suck less than it surely will, but alas, exhaustion.

Shoddy of Evidence

"4 Cases Illustrate Guantanamo Quandaries." The quandries thus illustrated reduce to the question of what to do with people who would be acquitted. Imagine a long think piece wondering how to "handle" the case of an accused murderer, say, who had an alibi and against whom any evidence was circumstantial at best and you get a sense of the sick absurdity of it all. The question our government seems intent on posing to itself is how best to make them all guilty.

Hello, Laziness

The economy of the modern college and university dictates an ever-decreasing number of tenure-track positions and an increased dependence on itinerant instructors, but shhh, don't tell Stanley Fish, whose inexplicable column-extra at the Times website reads as Thomas Bowdler in the role of Senator McCarthy as written by the teleplay team from the later seasons of Friends. Beyond the the bogeymen of tenured physics professors doing staged readings of Stokley Carmichael, Professor Poisson wails endlessly on the tragic decline of the teacherly arts, unprepared professors, lazy lecturers, deficient deans, and so on. It seems to me that the real bases for the Professor's goofball conclusions are less scatterbrained anecdotal observations of colleagues behaving badly than they are a total overestimation of the workplace ethic outside of academia. The timeliness, acumen, dedication, organization, attitude, teamwork, etc. of my coworkers is just as lousy as anything Fish describes. The habit of using office hours for unrelated activities--planning little Lexi's next girl scout trip; shopping ebay; making long personal calls on the office phone--is hardly limited to cryptomarxists in the College of Sciences. Let me put it to you this way: I am not the only one blogging from the office.

Fish, I suspect, is the type of Kulturkampf Entered Apprentice who, uninitiated, reads the business pages and thinks that "increased productivity" means that workers are actually producing more. Any neophyte cubicle-interred drone learns with alacrity to tell office cant and motivation-speak from actual communication. The Office is on television. Joshua Ferris just published Then We Came to the End and Ed Park just published Personal days, two charming, sad, very funny novels of the modern workplace. Also, uh, The Downturn™, which, one would think, would largely dispell notions that They Do It Better in the for-profit world. Stanley Fish finds himself in a workplace full of people phoning it in, scamming to get their personal agendas substituted for some else's assignments, shirking their duty. Bonjour, Paresse!