Good eats at the NWSA

While writing an email message to Claire (who is not a blogger and therefore cannot be linked here), I realized that I've had a pretty pitiful diet since I arrived in St. Charles on Wednesday at 12:30 a.m. Here is what I've eaten:

• Three muffins (two cranberry, one blueberry)
• Bag of popcorn
• Ben and Jerry's ice cream cone
• Three bites of fruit salad (before meeting with editor for NYU Press--I was nervous and couldn't finish)
• Very bad ham sandwich
• The equivalent of a bowl of the snack mix at the hotel bar

And then today, in a session with Linda Hirshman, Lisa Johnson saw how hungry I was and gave me half of her veggie wrap, thus adding a new food group (vegetables) to my conference diet.

National Women's Studies Association

I'm in St. Charles, IL, at the National Women's Studies Association Conference with such famous people as Deborah Siegel, Jessica Valenti, and Courtney Martin. I'm also hanging out with a fabulous cohort of WGS program directors from around the country, like Astrid Henry, Karlyn Crowley, and Ann Braithwaite (who's actually from Canada, but I think Biffle might be willing to relax his "I hate Canadians" stance for her sake).

I've been thinking a lot about feminist governance. Karlyn suggests that someone in Political Science needs to use NWSA as a model--perhaps a model of failure. Sitting through meetings with a room full of academics, each of whom wants to have her say and believes that her perspective makes a necessary contribution to the conversation, even if she's just repeating what other people have said--well, it's made me feel a little cynical about democracy. During one such meeting, Karlyn passed me a note that said "Hysterectomy or Democracy?" with check boxes. I checked Hysterectomy. Then she sent it back with "Feminist singing with guitar and drum or Democracy?" Feminist singing won, but not by much. Then I sent it back with "Hearing people talk vs. Gnawing my own leg off," and very soon I checked "Gnawing my own leg off."

Karlyn asks, "Is effective feminist democracy impossible since we're all trained to undermine and question leadership?"

cold-brewed coffee

I got an email from a friend this morning and just decided to turn it into a blog post.



On 6/28/07, E------ Mc----- <---------@starpower.net> wrote:

Is this right? How would it taste after the overnight counter setting?

June 27, 2007

Iced Coffee? No Sweat

By CINDY PRICE

BEFORE I go telling everybody that the secret to great iced coffee is already in the kitchen, my friend Keller wants me to confess: I didn’t know from iced coffee until he showed me the light.

It’s important to cop to this now, because not a summer goes by that he does not painstakingly remind me, a rabid iced-coffee drinker, that he’s the one who introduced me to the wonders of cold-brewed iced coffee. The funny thing is, when the subject came up we were holed up in a summer rental with three friends off the coast of Puerto Rico, on a tiny island not exactly swimming in upmarket coffee houses.

Our first morning there I brewed a blend from the local grocery in the coffeepot, laced it with a little half-and-half and sugar, then let it cool. Classy, I thought, carrying the pitcher to the table. “I’ll just take it hot,” he mumbled, while I blinked in disbelief.

Clearly, this boy didn’t know any better. A drink has a time and place. Surely he didn’t subscribe to drinking hot coffee in summer?

“No, I only drink iced coffee if it’s cold-brewed,” he said.

For five days we watched him sullenly sip his hot coffee on a broiling Caribbean island in the dead of summer. We chided him for his pretensions, ridiculed him, tried valiantly to break him, but he patiently waited us out. Once we tried it we would understand, he explained. Like friends disputing a baseball stat in a bar with no access to Google, we had no way to settle the argument.

Two weeks later, back in Brooklyn, I saw a sign: “Cold-Brewed Iced Coffee Served Here.” Fine, then. I threw down two bucks and took a sip. Though it pains me to admit, the difference was considerable. Without the bitterness produced by hot water, the cold-brewed coffee had hints of chocolate, even caramel. I dropped my sugar packet — no need for it. The best brews hardly need cream. It really is the kind of thing a gentleman might spend five days in hot-coffee solitary confinement for.

Most days I’m too lazy to hunt down the elusive cold-brewed cup. But recently I discovered an interesting little fact. Cold-brewed coffee is actually dirt simple to make at home. Online, you’ll find a wealth of forums arguing for this bean or that, bottled water over tap, the 24-hour versus the 12-hour soak. You can even buy the Toddy cold-brew coffee system for about $30.

But you can also bang it out with a Mason jar and a sieve. You just add water to coffee, stir, cover it and leave it out on the counter overnight. A quick two-step filtering the next day (strain the grounds through a sieve, and use a coffee filter to pick up silt), a dilution of the brew one-to-one with water, and you’re done. Except for the time it sits on the kitchen counter, the whole process takes about five minutes.

I was curious to see how it would taste without all the trappings. The answer is, Fantastic. My friend Carter, something of a cold-brewing savant, turned me onto another homegrown trick: freeze some of the concentrate into cubes. Matched with regular ice cubes, they melt into the same ratio as the final blend.

Very fancy. Can’t wait to tell Keller.

At 8 am, i wrote back:

"Like friends disputing a baseball stat in a bar with no access to Google," she writes. That sentence would have made sense in 1923, even, and she simply updated by slapping the Google on the end. Anyway: Yes, it's right. It would be very difficult to mess up cold-brewed coffee. Personally, i'd just say buy the kit and follow those instructions--and i'll tell you why in a second--but if you wanna go it alone follow these rules: 1: grind your coffee coarse. like one setting coarser than bistro pot. (is that how one spells "coarse"?) 2: A rough ratio is a gallon of water for a pound of beans. Regardless, it should be "sludgy." It would be hard to mess up as long as you use a lot of coffee. 3: Start with a 12 hour, countertop soak with room temperature, good quality water and then wait longer if you want to. I've let it sit for 24 hours before. It almost never gets bitter. et. al.: Start with good, fresh beans. Then, if you really wanna get nasty, use MAxwell House or something like that and the caffeine content will be out the roof. It'll still taste good, though. Now, here's the rub: The biggest problem--nay, the ONLY problem--with cold-brewing coffee is straining it. Even with the Toddy kit, if you don't pour the water in correctly, or if you move the bucket around too much, then the sucker gets stopped up and takes forever to drain. In the case of home made, you drain, but you just end up with silty coffee and that's not a good thing. Silt equals not-as-tasty and a shortened shelf life (as the coffee with eventually get bitter.) oh, and it'll store for 2-3 weeks [in the fridge]. I don't know if it'll keep longer than that as i've never been able to keep a batch this long. One final note: If you do indeed decide to try the maxwell house route, for God's sake, don't drink it straight up. Your eyeballs will fall out from all the caffeine. Alrighty. I think i'm gonna make this into a blog post. Talk to you later. w.

just stoppin by

Y'all may have noticed i'm not blogging that much here lately. I've been working too much. Today, for instance, i went in at 8 am and i got off at a little after midnight. Whew! That's a long day, man!

Quote of the day

I think there is something about modeling a deep self-reflection, a strong desire for real emotion and real honest closeness, that helps people to do this in their lives - counterbalances the messages that tell them to stay shallow and safe.

--Cindy Crabb, creator of the zine Doris

New Spectacles, part 2

I got my new glasses on Friday, and everyone who weighed in on what they should look like ought to be happy: they're red, they're rectangular, and they're different from my old ones. But I'm happy to say they're not very different from my old ones--most people haven't even noticed that I have new glasses, which has been a relief, as I dislike change.

I like these glasses a lot, except I fear I might look a bit like Roz from Monsters, Inc.

Sisterhood, Interrupted

Girl with Pen's new book, Sisterhood Interrupted, was released this week. It's a great book. A few months back I was asked to weigh in with my thoughts, and here's what I had to say:

Sisterhood, Interrupted tells the history of conflicts within feminism without demonizing or blaming. Siegel conveys the excitement of feminism, then and now. She offers an informed and sympathetic perspective on the second wave that will help younger readers understand what it was like to be part of a movement that planned to change the world. And her framing of contemporary feminism will shape future conversations. Her explanations of what's happening now--the significant trends and controversies within the movement--provide a clarity that's lacking in the work of many feminist authors, from any generation. I couldn't put it down.

We're considering having this as our Women's History Month book--we're planning to do our own version of the Big Read, where we'll get women's book groups around Charleston to read a feminist book and then come together for a big chocolate and champagne bash to discuss.

Anyway, when I went to the bookstore the other day to get my copy (I'd read the galleys before), I immediately looked inside the front cover to see if the publisher ended up using my comments in the "Additional Praise for Sisterhood, Interrupted" section. My heart sank when I saw that some of my colleagues were quoted, but I wasn't there. Rats.

Then I flipped the book over. And here's what I saw on the back cover:

Look at that! It's me! At the top! I remember the first time I was mentioned in an acknowledgments page, when I was in grad school and had been the research assistant for one of my professors' book projects. That was a thrill. Then, of course, it was beyond thrilling to hold my own book in my hand for the first time. It was a different kind of thrill when my books started showing up in the indexes and works cited of other people's books. And this is yet another step--showing up on someone else's back cover! I feel like a superstar.

Alright, I'm a bit embarrassed at myself for sharing all this goofy exuberance, but what the hell is a blog for if not for this.

You should all go out and get Deborah's book--you'll learn a lot, and it's a good read.

Garden State

A recent post on Kenneth's blog made me think about this little piece of drafty writing that's been sitting in my computer since September of 2004. Since I don't suppose it'll ever find a home anywhere else, I thought I'd post it here. I'll warn you up front, it's unfinished, it's academic-y (I'm sorry to say that I actually use the term "post-postmodern"), and the anonymi and others who found the Star Wars post objectionable for its analytical approach to pop culture are bound to find this unbearable. But for what it's worth, some thoughts on Garden State.

Let me start with the obvious feminist critique of the film. All the critics have recognized it as an heir to The Graduate, and like The Graduate, it casts a young white man’s individual journey as characteristic of an entire generational moment and presents women in their traditional roles as muses and nurturers (although absent The Graduate’s sexy Anne Bancroft.) I remember high school, when The Graduate was one of my favorite movies, identifying with Dustin Hoffman’s character but also recognizing, at some gut level, that my real role was supposed to be the weepy, doe-eyed “Elaine!” that he screams for, not to be the one screaming. Similarly, with Garden State the women are crucial, but still peripheral, to the transformation that’s occurring in Largeman. I’d hoped by this ostensibly “post-feminist” generation that the Everyman wouldn’t still be such a familiar and unquestioned figure, but apparently he still is. Also whiteness: the only people of color we see in the film are the receptionist at the medical office, the bellhop at the hotel, and Sam’s brother. The characters taking the journey—and inspiring it and propelling it—are all white.

Now moving to my larger, and perhaps less obvious, feminist assessment of the film.
I did find the film to be, as it’s touted, “This Generation’s Movie”—but I might define “this generation” more broadly than the film’s promoters, and I see it as iconic for reasons other than those most critics identify. Yes, Largeman’s reliance on—and rejection of—a whole host of pharmaceuticals speaks to this Prozac-Ritalin-Xanax nation. But what I see as relevant to/indicative of not only “Generation Y” but the whole post-Baby Boom, late capitalist, post-movement cultural moment is a rejection of cynicism and a reclaiming of sincerity, hope, and possibility.

We are a cynical bunch. All of us who were born in the last forty years know the deck is stacked. We know large, secret forces are amassed against us--that's why we understood the X-Files. Multinational corporations, ever more consolidated corporate owned media, etc. And Garden State is in some ways immersed in this sort of cynical irony:

• Life defined by media: when Largeman wants to cry at his mother’s funeral, he thinks of the saddest things he can—and they’re all media images. Actually being at his mother’s funeral isn’t the saddest thing he can think of. Life almost entirely mediated by pop culture images. We all want to be on TV. We all imagine our lives as sitcoms.
• In an early scene in Sam’s bedroom, she discusses wanting to do something unique, something that no one else has done before, and so she does a funky, weird dance that would be embarrassingly odd if she weren’t embracing it and enjoying it. She’s taken the modernist idea of genius, individual achievement, and given it a postmodern twist: she has no illusions that she can really be a pioneer, really have a significant idea or create a significant something that hasn’t already been done. We cynical postmodernists don’t have that illusion. This, in and of itself, is charming and identifiable to me, resonates with my experience—but the film doesn’t leave it at this.
  

Later, we meet a man who lives with his family in an ark at the bottom of a quarry. He becomes identified, tongue-in-cheek, as “the guardian of the infinite abyss.” When Sam, Largeman, and Mark ask him about why he took this job, and why he explores the abyss at night, he says essentially the same thing Sam had said earlier: he wants to do something new, something that no one else has done before. And then almost immediately he dismisses this: “But that’s just ego. Really what I want is to be here with this woman, and my child…” In this moment, the film takes a step away from postmodernism into something different, a kind of post-postmodern mentality. It moves from a playful postmodern revision or parodic reclaiming of a modernist idea to a kind of sincerity that I see as indicative of a post-postmodern ideology.

The family in the ark are central to the film’s transformation. Up until this point the film had had a kind of magical realist atmosphere, but it had been fantasy in the service of the utterly banal—Largeman sitting still while a drugged party unfolds in utter awfulness around him, the visual plane of his face being replaced by a cabinet of seemingly infinite drug bottles, a knight walking through the kitchen. With the ark, this all changes.

• It’s an ark, it’s at the bottom of a quarry, they have to take a kind of hero’s journey to get there: it’s established as an old-school symbolic, sacred site.
• The movie has set us up to expect some kind of awfulness (like the scene in the hotel where they’re watching people have sex)—it’s a junk yard at the bottom of an abandoned quarry that’s going to be a mall. We expect the worst kind of humanity. Largeman says he’s expecting to see “crack whores shooting turpentine.” And instead, a young-ish man opens the door holding an infant. He puts the baby to bed. His wife offers them tea. They are smiling.
• The guardian keeps talking about what he imagines: “I like to imagine that this is an ark, and if the apocalypse comes, we’ll float away.” “I like to imagine that the abyss is infinite.” This connects to my sense that I have a failure of imagination, perhaps a generational failure of imagination. This iconic figure of the guardian is advocating imagination.
  
• Largeman says, “Good luck guarding the infinite abyss.” The guardian pauses for a beat, then says, “You, too.” Largeman stops, then tilts his head back into the rain, stretches his arms out, and shakes his head hard, like he’s shaking loose his hair, his thoughts. Like he’s opening. I absolutely love this moment. It makes me cry every time I watch it.
  

Ultimately, what the film affirms are almost clichéd ideas: feeling your feelings, being in the moment, recognizing that this, right now, is your life. And I think the fact that it is unafraid of these clichés is yet another part of its post-postmodernity.

It’s not a film about activism, or feminism, in any immediately apparent way. But in its gentle loosening of the irony and cleverness of the postmodern social identity, in its willingness to offer up straightforward feeling, in its sweetness, is the film articulating a change that's occurring? Needs to occur? In feminism as well as other social justice movements?

New Spectacles

Although Nero did not actually fiddle while Rome burned, Alison did indeed sleep while Benya Chewed. Here is a photo of the somewhat straightened glasses. Any suggestions as to what kind of new ones she should get?

Being perfect

"Someday, sometime, you will be sitting somewhere. A berm overlooking a pond in Vermont. The lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. A seat on the subway. And something bad will have happened: You will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something at which you badly wanted to succeed. And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. You will look for some core to sustain you. And if you have been perfect all your life and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where that core ought to be."

--Anna Quindlen, Being Perfect (by way of Courtney Martin's Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters)

popemobile, part deux

Here's a little journey i've been on this morning (since i posted that below):

I googled popemobile.

I chose to read the wikipedia entry.

The word Portmanteau grabbed my attention the most and i clicked on it.

Being a good post-structuralist, i went on to read the link for Saussure.

Although i enjoyed this little bit of heady information, i was soon back on my usual pop culture track because of the fun "cultural references" section. In this case is was about the Magnetic Fields song called The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure.

Of most interest to me here, since i didn't know who they were, were the names Holland-Dozier-Holland.


Doing things like this is fun. It's also one of the reasons i know things like this:

The producer of the James Bond movies, Albert R. Broccoli, may be responsible for the death of Ted Healy, the original leader of the Three Stooges.

really?! Isn't there another name for that thing?

This was on one of my news feeds this morning...

Man tries to jump into popemobile

By DANIELA PETROFF Associated Press Writer

Article Launched: 06/06/2007 03:44:27 AM PDT

VATICAN CITY—A man tried to jump into Pope Benedict XVI's uncovered popemobile as the pontiff began his general audience Wednesday in St. Peter's Square and was wrestled to the ground by security officers.

The pope was not hurt and didn't even appear to notice that the man had jumped over the protective barricade in the square and toward the white popemobile as it drove by with the pope waving to the audience.

At least eight security officers who were trailing the popemobile grabbed the man and wrestled him to the ground. The pope didn't even look back.

Star Wars and the third wave

I’m obsessed with Star Wars. Sometimes I've felt a bit alone in this—my younger brother shares my obsession and sends me online information on the latest releases as well as every Star Wars tribute or parody he comes across—but I’ve never seen it as a particularly feminist obsession.

Until lately.

In the course of doing research for my book on zines by girls and women, I’ve begun to see a bit of a pattern among third wave feminists. Sarah Dyer, creator of the influential Action Girl Newsletter in the early ‘90s, makes reference in one zine to “our generation—by which I mean, of course, the Star Wars generation.” She’s recently recanted due to intense hatred of what she calls “the abomination that is George Lucas.” When I interviewed her last summer, we had a long digression in which we both ranted about what a jerk Lucas is, but even this is a sign of dedication, right? You don’t despise someone who isn’t living in your head already—it would be too much work.

I’ve recently come across another reference: Judy Superstar in Bust #5 (1995) offers ruminations on Star Wars as part of her teen development. She says, “I wanted to be Leia. And I wanted to fuck Han.” Didn’t we all. Her love for Han coincided with her struggles with her weight and body image; as she grew thinner and thinner, she longed for Han—and his “perfect blend of anti-establishment attitude and foolish heroics.” And then as she grew up, she became her own Han: “I changed schools and discovered punk rock, booze and the social possibilities of bulimia. I bleached my hair and became a new sort of worry for my parents.”

I never did become my own Han in the particular way Judy Superstar describes, but over the years I have found touchstones for my sense of identity in the Star Wars movies. Leia was a great example of a tough-talking, competent leader who was female but didn’t shriek in horror anytime a fight broke out. She could shoot a blaster like the rest of them. She remained competent even in the face of fear. She said, “Because I’m holding a thermal detonator” with complete calm. I have aspired to Leia-like qualities in my professional life.

Han was my official movie boyfriend for many, many years, and I seem to have married someone with his own personal blend of anti-establishment attitude and foolish heroics (like a redneck Wendell Berry-ish Han Solo). And I love the community in the movies, the solidarity, the intense battles followed by sappy togetherness. As six-year-old Adam Krasnoff said on seeing Han swoop in and shoot Darth Vader’s ship at the end of A New Hope, “He came back for his friend! That was so nice!” This gets at a lot of what I love about Star Wars.

I don’t know that any of this has anything to do with feminist politics, but I do think Star Wars functions as a generational dividing line between second and third wave feminists. Joanna Russ, the quintessential second waver who Conseula and I interviewed this weekend, despises Star Wars because of its celebration of authoritarian government and its hypermasculine vibe. Meanwhile, third wavers like Sarah Dyer, Judy Superstar, the Afrogeeks, and I are big fans and experience the films as something beyond their literal plot-level message.

So here, as everyone from the television networks to the Post Office tries to hop on the Star Wars thirty-year anniversary bandwagon and make a buck off of tightfisted, crazy-ass George Lucas, I’ll offer my own little shout out to Star Wars. I acknowledge that Lucas is a wank stain, but the universe he created—especially in the first three films—is a really cool place to hang out.