The bread of friendship

A few weeks ago one of our friends stopped by our house with a gallon-sized Ziploc bag filled with a thin white fluid that looked like—well, like baby sick in a plastic baggie. Charming, right? “Here you go,” he said to us. “Friendship bread. Take care of it.” Then he was off and away, no doubt cackling at the top of his little lungs once he was out of earshot.

I’d never heard of Friendship Bread before, but apparently it’s widespread enough that it has its own Wikipedia entry. Basically it’s the pastry form of a chain letter. You receive a yeast starter (like a sourdough) that allegedly originated from the Amish, from a friend. For nine days you follow the instructions on the sheet that comes with it—instructions that largely consist of squeeze the bag, so that it gives the illusion of simplicity. Halfway through the process, you have to give the starter a little snack of flour, milk, and sugar. Over time, the starter changes from a gruel-like white to toenail-fungus yellow, and begins to bubble, foam, and produce massive amounts of gas. I was burping the Ziploc bag several times a day and recoiling from the yeasty, fermented aroma.

Finally comes the big tenth day. After dumping the ever-growing Audrey II mix into a bowl and adding more milk, sugar, and flour, it’s your turn to scoop out cupfuls of the reeking stuff and put it into three one-gallon plastic bags (just like the Amish have done with Ziploc bags handed down through the generations) to hand out to your friends, along with a clean copy of the instructions for care. I stress the word clean, because by the time I reached day ten, my copy was covered with grunge and starter. Then you bake the bread.

I hadn’t really studied the recipe before I started preparing it. All I knew is that it was supposed to create two loaves of a lightly sweet bread. Lightly sweet, my flat ass. My eyes began to bulge out as I mixed the thing, and continued to bulge as I added ingredient after ingredient, because it seemed to read like this:

Add four cups of flour to the bowl.
Add one cup of sugar.
Add 1/2 tsp. of baking powder.
Add two cups of sugar.
Add 1 tsp. of baking soda.
Add one cup of sugar.

It was when the recipe exhorted me to add “One large box of vanilla pudding (low-fat or sugar-free is fine)” that I decided that whoever wrote the recipe had a fairly mean sense of irony. Especially as the next step was to “Coat baking pans with non-stick baking spray and dust with one-half cup of sugar.”

How was the bread? It was fine. It was a fairly dense, far-from-lightly sweet concoction that tasted like coffee cake more than anything. It was so much like a quick bread I’m not really convinced it needed a starter, to be honest. But spread with butter and roasted under the broiler, it was delicious.

Oh, what happened to my starters, you ask? I foisted one on Ford Girl, who left hers out overnight to freeze and die. The other went to our friend Jeffrey, who let it sit on his kitchen counter for two weeks before he admitted that he’d forgotten about it. He then apologized and said that he really could only have taken care of the friendship bread if the recipe had asked for cocktail pickles and cajun spices to be added to the starter, because that’s all he had in his pantry. Which he might have mentioned when we gave it to him.

The last packet went to our friend Clark. Ten days after I gave Clark the packet, I got a flurry of text messages from him. Why does it use so much sugar?! he asked. I’m running out of sugar! said the next.

Ah, friendship and diabetes. They walk together hand in hand.

The Brick Wall

I doubt I’m the only music lover alone in experiencing a total and utter burnout over a particular musician. I’m referring specifically to the phenomenon I think of as the Brick Wall Album—a band or artist’s release that completely impedes a fan from following them any further.

I’m not talking about the artist you dislike from the get-go. I’m not talking about the artist who has a promising release or two and then peters out gradually, so that one day there’s a realization that you haven’t listened to her in, well, years, and don’t really care (hi, Sinead O’Connor!), or the artist you might have on the cusp of liking, who then releases something that you listen to with bafflement a few times before deciding she was never really your cup of tea after all. (Why yes, I’m talking about Boys for Pele. How did you know?)

No, I mean the artist whom you love unreservedly for years and years, and whom you purchase automatically on the day that he or she drops a new album. The artist you assume you’ll be listening to until the day you die. The artist who, one day without warning or betrays you by foisting upon your poor ears an album that’s such an offense and an aural assault that after one play, you’re finished with the musician. Forever. Not only do you refuse to listen to that particular album ever again, but it poisons your view of everything else from that artist that you’ve enjoyed in the past. You’re done. Out. Kaput. No more, ever again. Boom! Brick wall.

Does it sound familiar?

My example? Talking Heads. I loved the band during my college years, when they were a favorite on the student radio station. Remain in Light was one of my first-ever LP purchases, quickly followed by my purchase of their first three albums. I wore out my cassette tape of Speaking in Tongues. I saw the movie of Stop Making Sense a half-dozen times when it was released, and caught every concert of the group I could during the nineteen-eighties. I could sing Little Creatures backwards while walking a police line. I loved, loved, loved True Stories.

And then Naked came out. I gave it one spin. My reaction was, bluntly, something along the lines of, “The hell.” And then I never listened to Talking Heads again. If one of their songs came up on random play on my iTunes list, I’d rush to skip it.

For the life of me, I’m not really sure what it was about that album that so turned me off. I don’t have a particular animus against the one single I remember, “Nothing But Flowers.” Kirsty MacColl sings backup on a couple of songs, which you’d think would be a huge plus, since I was a fan of hers. (It’s not.) I’m not even sure I could give the thing another listen, considering the revulsion I have for it—that and the fact that I think it’s the only CD I’ve ever bought that I tossed in the garbage can. After one listen of Naked, though, I basically refused to tolerate the group ever again. Until a couple of weeks ago, anyway, when I imported all my old CDs into iTunes and started remembering why I enjoyed them. But it took twenty-two years!

Okay, so maybe Talking Heads wasn’t the best example, because Naked was really their last release. I’ll throw out another from someone with a longer career.

Prince. You know. The purple wonder. Mr. Doves Cry. Yeah, I loved that little midget for a very, very long time, starting with his very first release. By the time he came out with the 1999 album, I was convinced he was the musical messiah; I was basically walking around my college campus knocking on strange doors with a copy of 1999 in hand, asking people if they’d heard of how their eternal souls could be saved by the gracious good power of Minneapolis funk.

My enthusiasm peaked all during the years Prince played with the Revolution. For dances at school I would dress in tight pants, shirts with lace cravats, and sparkly homemade blindfolds with one eye cut out, so that I looked like a refugee from a Purple Rain-era video. I camped out overnight once for tickets to see Prince, the Time, and Vanity 6. I ran through two copies of Parade on my Walkman. Any spin-off act Prince produced, I bought. The Time? Owned every album. Vanity and Apollonia 6? Girrrrrl, I can still rap the entire “If A Girl Answers (Don’t Hang Up)” at the drop of a hat. (It’s a pity it’s not available for karaoke.) The Family? Still think it’s the most underrated album of the nineteen-eighties. Ditto for Jill Jones.

I was still in awe of the little devil all through Around the World in a Day and Sign o’ the Times, and even after he broke away from the Revolution and started getting a little weird. I confess that LoveSexy ticked me off a little—not because of the music, which I really liked, but because I bought the original CD that had no track markers in it, which forced me to listen to the entire CD or nothing. I didn’t really get the Batman release, for example, but I dug the “Batdance” single and was willing to groove along with the rest.

Then came the Brick Wall Album: Graffiti Bridge. I popped it into my CD player, endured it with the same expression I might have if I’d found an unexpected turd on the bottom of my shoe, and never listened to Prince again. I have almost my entire music library ripped onto my computer—1600 CDs. Batman is not one of them. So yes, I missed a ton of music from the little guy that people would swear up and down I should best believe I would l-o-v-e love, but eh. I didn’t really care. I did like the single of “Chelsea Rodgers” two years ago, and went so far as to buy it, but it didn’t make me a fan again. It wasn’t really until January, when I started spontaneously wailing “The Beautiful Ones” in the shower (“Do u want him? Or do u want me? Cause I want u!”) that I realized even after a twenty-year moratorium, Prince’s music was still firmly wedged in my psyche, no doubt taking up space that could be put to more practical use for remembering dental appointments and or to get postage stamps.

I’ve experienced the Brick Wall in literature, too, though I’m a little softer and more lenient with my favorite authors. When Anne McCaffrey resolved a late-in-life novel by having a meteorite fall from the sky and kill a villain, hooray, problem resolved, end of book!, I kind of gently struck her from my to-buy-borrow-or-library-loan list and set her aside for many years. I might consider reading through some of my old favorites of hers, though. Connie Willis’ Passage was so freaking scary and upsetting that I refused to re-read anything of hers for years after its release, but I bought and am enjoying Blackout right now. But musical artists, once they slam me into the wall, seem never to win me back.

Who else has hit a brick wall with an artist?

A thank-you

In the Garden of Iden is one of the best first novels of a series I’ve ever read. In Kage Baker’s universe, scientists from a shady organization known only as The Company have developed not only a way to travel through time, but have developed the resources to transform small children into cyborgs, and to augment their brains and bodies and train them to work quietly on the sidelines of humanity. Baker’s cyborgs are largely gentle librarians of an immortal sort, cataloguing and preserving the creations and resources that short-lived humans squander.

In the Garden of Iden follows the adventures of Mendoza, saved from the Spanish Inquisition as a child, turned into a Company cyborg, and sent as an adult to catalogue the garden of an English country squire in the year 1553. Mendoza finds herself falling in love with an outspoken Protestant during the reign of Catholic Queen Mary. The turmoil that follows is tense, gripping, and a fantastic read that’s rich in period detail and humor.

I was equally enchanted by the two sequels that followed. In Sky Coyote, Mendoza and her mentor, Joseph, attempt to convince a pre-Columbian tribe that they are gods come to save the tribe from Europeans that soon will raze the land completely. And in the superb Mendoza in Hollywood, Mendoza finds herself in mid-nineteenth-century California, confronted by a familiar face seemingly resurrected to torture her.

What keeps the entire ten-volume series moving is its inexorable march to a doomed future, to a specific date in the twenty-fourth century after which no more Company communications are transmitted to the past. The immortal cyborgs fear—with good reason—that the date is their last on earth, and a small handful decide to resist whatever dire fate the Company has in mind. I wish I could say that the rest of the series is as fantastic as the first three books, but I honestly can’t. Once Baker moves past the current day, for me the novels lose their groundedness; when an author’s outstanding strength is weaving in historical detail, it’s a pity when they move out of the bounds of history. The final volume is so convoluted and dependent upon a fleet of secondary characters that I more or less gave up on making sense of it all. I enjoyed it. I simply didn’t understand every nuance, after nine previous volumes and eleven years.

However, I will say this: even past the first three books, rarely has a long series been so readable, or consistently funny, or have some of the characters been so dear to me.

It was with a little shock that I read a couple of weeks ago that Baker was gravely ill from uterine cancer, and with even more dismay that I read she’d passed away, Sunday. To those who never read her novels and short stories of the Company, I’d strongly urge you to indulge.

Launch My Line

I confess: when it was announced last year that Project Runway would be moving from Bravo to the Lifetime network, my heart sank a little. One of my favorite competitive reality shows, moving from the network that gave it birth to a channel that seemed perpetually to be rerunning Mother May I Sleep with Danger? I didn’t think so.

Not that Bravo exactly did right by its old property, mind you. Scarcely had the first season of Project Runway swept off the runway than Bravo began popping out imitators—first Top Chef, which developed into a view-worthy show of its own, and then the terrible Top Design, memorable (and not in a good way) for the send-off line of “See ya later, decorator.” Then came the bizarre and yet secretly enjoyable Shear Genius, in which hair stylists did terrible things to models’ heads for a cash prize and the privilege of being jabbered at in incomprehensible English by a Danish mentor. When Project Runway departed, Bravo brought forth The Fashion Show, a program that adhered so slavishly to the Project Runway formula that it was indistinguishable—in all but talent and impact, that is.

Then came Bravo’s latest attempt at catching the Project Runway magic: Launch My Line, it’s called, and it involved a lot of celebrities—and the show’s producers play fast and loose with that word, since the contestants are DJs, fashion writers, promotion event directors, and jewelry designers—who are paired with no-name designers to create and launch their own cohesive line of celebrity-label clothing. It seems an odd aspiration to become the next 6126, but there you go. I resisted watching the show for its first month, because The Fashion Show had simply been that bad. After catching a recording of the first episode, however, I began catching up—because the show is simply still that bad, but compelling in the way that Shear Genius could be.

The ‘celebrities’ receive the same sorts of stunty, contrived challenges as the old Project Runway alumni. One week they’re making cocktail dresses out of materials they’ve distressed themselves, then the next they’re spinning giant game show wheels to determine that they’ve got to make a dress that allows the model to visit a bris in the morning and attend a night at the Grammys at night. (I’m still waiting for the challenge on one of these shows that requires designers to collaborate on something with their wrists and ankles cuffed together.) But here’s the thing: not one of the contestants has any clothing design skills whatsoever, so they’re totally reliant upon their designer to sketch, cut, and sew everything.

Some of the celebrities, like my favorite, Merle Ginsberg, the only actual woman who was a regular on RuPaul’s Drag Race, leap right in to the process and have learned somewhat about the construction of garments. Others, like power executive Marilyn Crawford, have responded to the challenge by listening to the instructions, nodding, and saying as they snap fingers at their designer, “Okay, I want it to be elegant. Go!” Other than a few pointed eyerolls and befuddled responses when faced with the difficulties of creating garments that would meet the celebrities’ specifications and yet not drop off the models’ bodies, we don’t see much of the designers doing all the work. They’re mostly relegated to the background, so that we can listen to the celebrities complaining about each other.

It’s this shift of focus away from the work that makes Launch My Line so watchable and yet so bad. When the garments come out onto the runway, we’ve no idea what makes them attractive or awkward or appropriate, or part of a vision or constructive process. We do know, however, how everyone feels about the kooky jewelry designer burning sage in the workroom, and how many bon mots professional dandy Patrick McDonald has dropped that episode. After five seasons of showing the creative process at work in Project Runway, Bravo seems to have done an about-face on its view of professional artists. In the world of Launch My Line, the personalities are inescapable and the bitchery is thigh-deep, while the talent necessary to make a line of clothing, they seem to be telling us, need only be as substantial as the labels sewn into the neckline.

Worst! Rescue! Ever!

Dear Doctor Who Fanbase,

I am one of you. I have been one of you for decades. In fact, I’ve been one of you longer than most of you Johnny-come-latelys have—about twenty-five years, now.

I’m enough of a fan that I’ve seen every episode that’s extant, from 1963’s “An Unearthly Child” onward. Most of them at least twice. In fact, I still have most of them moldering away on VHS tapes in my basement. Sarah Jane was my favorite companion long before she had her own show. Tom Baker and Peter Davison are my favorite old-school Doctors, but I actually liked Colin Baker’s sixth doctor, and thought his companion, Peri was super-hot. I have endured more Dalek invasions and Cybermen and cheesy garbage-can-liner monsters than you can shake a sonic screwdriver at, and frankly think that none of them were as annoying as the ceaseless repetition of Are you my mummy? from the modern-era “The Empty Child.” I am one of those—okay, I’m the only one—who numbers “Delta and the Bannermen” as among his favorite episodes.

So you can see, I’m not one of those fly-by-night fans who thinks that Doctor Who begins and ends with David Tennant. I liked him an awful lot, mind you. I still think that “Human Nature” and “The Family of Blood” are two of the most heart-wrenching episodes ever made, and that “Blink” is one of the most suspenseful hours of television produced ever. Period. I’m sad to see Tennant leave, but you know, Doctors come and go, and they always have.

Which is why I feel I must protest slightly over the excessive amount of show-bashing currently going on, now that the transition has started from Tennant to his successor. I’ve seen a lot of teeth-gnashing over the specials leading up to his regeneration. What about Donna Noble, they ask? She was such a brilliant companion (and she really was)—and all she gets out of the experience is a wiped memory and a lottery ticket? And as for the rest, that was the ending? Why didn't it end this way? Every angry fan who somehow didn’t like it claims that he or she could have written Tennant’s demise better.

But Doctor Who fans, I’d like to point out a couple of things. For one, companions never really have happy endings. Sarah Jane Smith rode along with the third and fourth Doctors for longer than anyone, and in the end got dumped off without even so much as a how-de-do, someplace miles away from home. Adric died. Tegan and Nyssa left the Doctor in disgust, deeply disturbed and distressed. We all know River Song ends up trapped in the library forever, and she hasn’t even been a companion yet. Peri Brown had a slug’s brain transplanted into her body. Companions just don’t have happy endings, by and large, so a blank slate and a lottery ticket sounds pretty good to me. But heck, you internet forum-loving fans complain about anything; when Rose Tyler got a semi-happy ending—wealth, her dead father resurrected and reunited with her mother, and even her own carbon copy of the tenth Doctor for her very own—you bitched about that.

The other thing I’d like to point out is that the two “End of Time” episodes were actually pretty good. The moment in which the Doctor heard the four knocks that presage his demise? Unexpectedly lovely. The interactions between him and Wilf, Donna Noble’s grandfather? Utterly touching. The subtle hints that the woman who’d been appearing to Wilf throughout both episodes was Susan Foreman, the Doctor’s granddaughter? For an old-school Who-lover like me, it really made the show. I suspect that, in a couple of years, when the Tennant era is a fond memory, you people will be able to look back on these episodes and separate your personal distress of the Tennant era ending from their actual merits.

The episodes have been written, filmed, and broadcast. There’s not really much you can do about them now, with your endless picking and what-ifs and what-could-have-beens. Arguing and fanwanking might be a pleasurable activity to ease your sorrow over Tennant’s departure, but it’s not going to change the shows themselves, nor is it going to bring him back. Enjoy the glorious seasons you had for what they were, please. They’ll still be available to watch over and over again on DVD.

Yours,
A Doctor Who fan who actually enjoys the show.

P.S. I still love "Delta and the Bannermen." Shut up.

High-Def, Low Culture

Shortly before the holidays I had a journal entry written in my mind about Christmas gifts. It was a humble little homily in which I was going to admit that we hadn’t exchanged gifts on Christmas day for three years, or gone in together on something for ourselves for quite some time, in favor of things like mortgage payments and food. I was going to confess that I always felt uncomfortable and put on the spot whenever someone would ask what Santa brought me, because saying nothing always seemed to make the person asking the question feel awkward and intrusive. It was going to be a sweet little tract about how I was happy to forego presents during the holiday season; it was going to meditate upon the True Meaning of Christmas and end upon a shining note.

Then my dad sent the Mont a fat check—a bribe for putting up with me essentially—and we went out and bought a high-definition television, and all that sanctimonious nonsense went out the window.

I’ve never really been around HDTVs very much. Oh, I’d seen them in the stores, of course, playing the latest Disney movies or featuring impressive vistas of penguins frolicking upon ice floes. I’d seen them playing sports in bars—but honestly, I don’t pay attention to sports. I don’t have any friends who have one, or at least friends who invite me over. So I’ve been very surprised, now that it’s all installed and everything, at how compelling the image is. When the cable guy showed up to upgrade our boxes to carry the high-definition channels, I found myself sinking down onto the sofa when he was gone and staring at the pretty, pretty screen, with its bright colors and sharp, crisp shapes. Everything was just so clean and distinct, so colorful and strokable.

Everything was so beautiful, in fact, that it took me a whole half hour to of mesmerized watching to realize that I’d been watching the absolute nadir of television programming, one of those Real Housewives shows with which Bravo clutters its airwaves. That’s when I leapt up and fled.

I realize that at this point in the technology curve I sound like an aboriginal fascinated by a Bic lighter, but goodness, everything is gorgeous in high definition. I watched an episode of Dirty Jobs in which Mike Rowe climbed the Mackinac Bridge to change a light bulb, or some such nonsense, and my stomach roiled when the camera switched views to display the lake below, visible and churning violently beneath the bridge’s vivid, fragile-looking grate, hundreds of feet below. I can’t watch anything on the Food Network without my stomach growling. And I found myself fascinated by an episode of Maury simply because baby daddies and back-stabbing ho’s are that much more compelling when they’re larger than life and twice as crisp.

It's a shame that high definition does nothing to improve my low standards of entertainment.

My New Year's Not-quite-resolution

What is perhaps my favorite photo of myself from 2009 was one of the very last photos taken of me, last year, taken a few minutes before midnight on new year’s eve.



I like it because I seem to be having fun in it. After a year in which I remember doing little else than moping about, glum and depressed, it’s nice to realize that I had fun.

I’m not really one who believes in new year’s resolutions. I know myself well enough to realize that by now, my life isn’t magically going to change because the calendar flips a page. I’d like to think that this year can be better than the couple that have preceded it, though. I’d like to make it more fulfilling, and to come out of it not feeling as if my life hasn’t diminished in quality. Ensuring that outcome, of course, depends mostly upon me, upon the way I choose to see things over the upcoming months, and upon the opportunities I choose to create for myself. I like to think I’m ready for that particular challenge, though.

So here’s a year filled with photos of me looking happy! (Starting with Fred's feline ass in my face as I try to edit the proofs of The Buccaneer's Apprentice.)