In the Headlights

PostSecret: The Show

Last Friday, L.C. and her husband went to a live PostSecret show, and it sounds like they had a pretty good time.  Here, in her own words she describes the experience.  If there's ever one within a two or three hour drive of me, I am so there.

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Last night's show at Alexandria's Old Town Theater was more than just Post Secret's world premier  of its first DVD accompanied by lovely, haunting, LIVE music composed by one of the performers. Post Secret http://postsecret.blogspot.com has received over 40,000 postcards since its inception just two years ago. Amazingly, Ralph and I realized that we had been there at the beginning! The beginning was Art-O-Matic, a bi-annual free-for-all artistic (mostly) extravaganza in the DC area. http://www.artomatic.org/ The location changes each time because organizers locate large buildings slated for renovation or for demolition in which to house the very large art happening. Last time, where we saw the very first Post Secret post cards, it was in the former DC Children's Museum where I had gone – not so long before with my parents. 

In the beginning, Frank Warren, not an artist, but rather an Internet entrepreneur, handed out, left in library books, distributed in restaurants, and gave out on the street two hundred self addressed, stamped post cards asking people to share a secret. Those he received were put on display at Art-O-Matic. Then, even after Art-O-Matic, the postcards kept coming. Now he has "in a safe location" over 40,000.

The movie and music, followed by a question and answer session were perfectly paired with Found, http://www.foundmagazine.com/index.php?fuseaction=events.home

Home page of Davy Rothbart whose collection of found objects and notes fuels the site and books and now the Cavalcade of Thrills Tour with his brother Peter Rothbart. Davy explained how HIS project was born. One morning in Chicago he found a note under the snow on his car's windshield which read, "Mario, you cheating $%^&*%@! I know you are here at HER house, you %^$#*&^%$#@! It's over! , Angela P.S. Page me later." Understandably, he was hooked. Now people send him found notes from all over the world. He has authored short stories and many features for NPR's "This American Life." Davy's little (but much taller) brother Peter played some of his delightfully funny songs that were inspired by found items. Our favorite was the absolutely hilarious rendition of "Girl, the booty don't stop;" have you ever gotten a song stuck in your head?

Check out their website to see if they'll be in a town near you; it's a fun show!

The icing on the entertainment cake was that the night's profits from the show and from book and CD sales went to the national suicide hotline, 1-800-suicide.

[Images from PostSecret]

Blue Cheese Cole Slaw

LC is our guest blogger today.  She made this salad for a Memorial Day picnic and says it's great.  Remember to keep mayonnaise containing dishes cold.  That's what the cooler is for.  The cole slaw and the Yeungling.

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Blue Cheese Coleslaw

1 med. head cabbage (shred, preferably in food processor)
4 green onions, with tops, sliced
1 C. mayonnaise
1/4 C horseradish (why do they say "prepared?" Have you seen other?
1/2 C blue cheese (not mushy kind; low fat or fat free feta also works great)
Salt and pepper to taste (taste first, since the cheese is pretty salty itself.)

Place ingredients in a large bowl and toss to combine.

Sounds great to me.  I often cut my cabbage with a knife.  If you have a sharp chef's knife and are sober, that works well.  It gives you a coarser slaw, but I like it.  It also might not be a bad idea to make it early so the flavors have a chance to blend.

Tim Burton's Corpse Bride

I just finished watching Tim Burton's Corpse Bride.  I just love his stuff.  It is so creepily charming. Or so charmingly creepy.  Take your pick.

The plot (what plot?) involves a hapless young fiancee who practices his vows in the woods and winds up married to a corpse instead of his warm-blooded intended.  But what a cute corpse! Big blue eyes...and blue skin...and blue hair.  And a cute little maggot who keeps crawling out of her ear and popping her eye out of its socket.

What's not to like?

The characters are quirky.  The animation wonderful.  It is typical Burton with its singing and dancing ghouls and skeletons.  You feel for the characters at the same time that you laugh at something going in the background, all the while wondering how this mess can ever be resolved. The worst thing about it is that at one hour and seventeen minutes, it is too short.

Johnny Depp is the voice of Victor Van Dort marking the fifth cinematic collaboration between Depp and Burton.  If it works, don't fix it.

Helena Bonham Carter plays the bride, also fresh from a recent collaboration with Depp and Burton in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  Remember when she was considered such a serious actress?

Emily Watson is Victoria, Victor's intended.

This is another in a long line of strange but endearing films by Tim Burton.  I've enjoyed Beetle Juice, Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands.  I was OK on Mars Attacks and Ed Wood.  But now I spot something I have to see:  Stalk of the Celery.  How did I ever miss that?

Dress Up Your Next Bash

I like these a lot.  Pier 1 Imports.  Eight geometric hors d'oeuvre pics and holder in aluminum and stainless steel, only $10.  Olives, cheese, shrimp, antipasto sold separately, at a store near you.

Also from Pier 1, these lovely glasses are on sale for $2.25 to $2.50 apiece.  In green, violet or coral or blue.

Garlic Butter

At work yesterday, a friend was telling me about making garlic butter.  He said he took a stick of butter, and added a big clove of garlic.  At this point, he gestured with his hand, indicating holding something the size of a baseball in his palm.

"Bulb"  I murmured.

In any case, he had take a bulb's worth of garlic, tossed it in the food processor with a stick of butter, and then smeared it on bread and browned it in a pan, Texas toast style.  Yum.

I decided to take it a step further.  I think parsley goes well with butter and garlic.  But once I got to the garden to get the parsley, I thought a little basil and oregano would go quite nicely as well.  It all went into the mixer with a stick of lightly salted butter and eight cloves of garlic.

I have plans for this stuff.  Not just for garlic bread (buttered french bread toasted under the broiler), but tossed into pasta, or a dollop on cooked fish or shrimp.  A teaspoonful melted atop a charred rare steak.  Even on mashed potatoes.

Let the feasting begin. 

Don't Forget to Remember

In Flanders Fields by John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead.  Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunsets glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up the quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders Fields

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Gives me goosebumps.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, and we take a day off to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice to ensure our freedom to barbecue, drive hundreds of miles to spend a day with family, get sunburned and mosquito-bitten, drink beer, and watch parades.

I mean it.  They died so that we can live our lives, mundane as they may be, as we choose.

The first Memorial Day was observed May 30, 1868, to honor those who died in the Civil War. After World War I, it was changed to honor those Americans who died fighting any war.

At 3 PM, there is the National Moment of Remembrance, asking all Americans "To voluntarily and informally observe in their own way a Moment of remembrance and respect, pausing from whatever they are doing for a moment of silence or listening to 'Taps."

My Dad fought in Europe in World War II.  He lost many friends, particularly in a little known battle called Operation Northwind.  During the last winter of the war, after the Battle of the Bulge, this action involved 26 days of combat in the montains and plains close to Strasbourg, with the Germans sending in everything they had left, including 150,000 troops.  Pop was in the 70th Division of the Seventh Army which left over 11,000 Americans dead, seriously wounded or in enemy hands that January in 1945.

My brother-in-law's father was with Easy Company and a few years ago he sent us video tapes of the movie "Band of Brothers".  I can't attest to its veracity, but my Dad felt it depicted the way the war was quite accurately.  It follows the story of an airborne infantry company, Easy Company (the 506th  Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S.Army) from boot camp through the end of the war.  It is beautifully filmed, brutal, engaging, violent.  It runs 999 minutes, so should be watched in installments.  Not only is it long in time, it is a lot to take emotionally.  But I feel our nation would have a healthy distaste for war if everyone had to watch this film.  Our leaders should watch it at least once a year.

The movie was made from the book Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose.  The only book I've read by Ambrose was Undaunted Courage, about Lewis and Clark and the taming of the West.  I found that book very readable, so the first thing I will do when I close this post is order his Band of Brothers.

Happy Memoria Day.  Don't forget to remember.

Carnival of the Recipes

The Memorial Day Carnival of the Recipes is up at One Happy Dog Speaks.  He'll be even happier if anyone gives him any of today's table scraps.

vw bug started by reminding us why this holiday is so important, and then opened up the red, white and blue picnic basket and treated us to breakfast, soups and salads, lunch, dinner, desserts and, for everything else, miscellaneous.  Everything you need for the big family get together.

Check it out.

[Logo borrowed from the host site, obviously.  Here's the credit.]

Stumbling on Happiness: The Book Report

I ordered Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard after hearing a couple of interviews on the radio.  I'm glad I did.

While it hasn't changed my life in any profound ways, the book made me laugh a lot, something I never take for granted, and am always grateful for.  And it did give me some interesting insight into what motivates us.

Each chapter begins with a pertinent quote from our man Shakespeare, which is pretty cool too.

We are all driven by the desire for happiness, usually for our future selves.  Thus, much of what we do in the present doesn't make us happy in the present, unless we are about two years old.  We do it in service of our future selves, who, when they look back at the present (later the past), will probably not appreciate the pains we take and the decisions we make in the here and now.

Got that?  Good.

Our ability to look at the present or the past is not only not objective, it is very much colored by what we believe or feel today. Our brains fill in blanks in our memories, so that what we remember only dimly resembles what actually happened, even though the memory may be vivid, and we are certain of its veracity. Our view of the future is built by our imaginations, quite unreliably as well, and is based on how we feel today.  One example is that after eating a huge meal, we can't fathom what it feels like to be hungry, and can believe that we will be hungry the next day, or even later the same day, we are so stuffed. This also explains all the lifetime gym memberships bought by people who are sure today they will lift weights for a lifetime, becoming buff and beautiful.  I know I've done that a time or two... The present is defining the future.  But, of course, it's wrong.

Gilbers supports his premises with psychological studies, which are by and large fascinating.  He sprinkles his narrative with examples and comments that are totally loony.  I laughed until I teared up a number of times.

He talks quite a bit about how the brain works behind the scenes. And how it fools each of us.  Regularly and reliably. It's amazing to read, and explains so much.  About me.  About you.  About them.

In the end, he tells us something we can do to make ourselves considerably more happy.  He says we don't do it because we don't believe it will work--because each of us believes we are unique.  But I think that oversimplifies it.  I think we also don't do it because it is not as simple as stated.  But no, I am not going to tell you what will enhance our happiness (but what we don't do even when we know).  I read the book to get there, and so should you.

It's worth it.  I gained a lot of insight and some laughs.  A great deal for the investment in time and money.

If that doesn't work, we can always resort to warm puppies, bluebirds and warm guns.

[Bluebird from The Stanford Dish; puppy from Petmeister]

Animated Dandelion Weed

RR sent us this albino peacock.  Breathtaking.

Kiki's Paris

How many famous people have you slept with?

OK.  Unfair.  How many famous people have you ever seen in person?

Even if you're a star writing a tell-all book, Kiki's got you beat.  At least in the first part.  I mean, she never went to the Oscars, or anything, where you can see hundreds of famous people in one venue.

Kiki's Paris is an astonishing collection of photographs, drawings and paintings of Kiki and her friends and lovers accompanied by wonderful stories.  She was a model, often nude, as well an artist in her own right, and a particular darling of the Dadaists and Surrealists.

There is currently a show of artists' renderings of Kiki as well as some of her own artwork at Zabriskie Gallery in New York City.  They specialize in Dadaist and Surrealist art.

Kiki was born Alice Ernestine Prin in 1901.  At 16, she went to Paris, and became a favorite nude model for many of the artists in the Montparnasse district on the Left Bank in the 1920's. When she first got to Paris, she asked if they polished the streets with wax.

In the 1920's, an incredible array of painters, sculptors, writers and photographers inhabited the Left Bank and hung out at the Rotonde.

An early intimate of the group was Modigliani, a handsome and enormously talented painter and sculptor.  He died in 1920 at age 36 of a respiratory infection.  In despair, his mistress, Jeanne threw herself out of a fifth story window.  She was nine months pregnant at the time.

It wasn't all beer and skittles in Montparnasse during its golden age.  There were cold-water flats, and angry, deserted wives.  There was alcoholism, depression and suicide.  There was also love, excitement, genius and freedom.

Reading this book, you'll recognize a lot of names, and learn a lot more about other talented artists whose names  might not be household words.  Among her friends and lovers:

Constantin Brancusi
Marc Chagall
Rene Clair
Jean Cocteau
Marcel Duchamp
Max Ernst
Tsuguharu Foujita (the most commercially successful artist at the time)
Ernest Hemingway
Man Ray
Henri Matisse
Joan Miro
Amedeo Modigliani
Pablo Picasso
Ezra Pound
Marcel Proust
Pierre Auguste Renoir
Diego Rivera
Erik Satie
Chaim Soutine
Gertrude Stein

The book actually covers a period from the late 1800's until the early 1930's.  There are many more artists and personalities woven in and out of the story.  It is a story of friends, art, parties and genius, but also of alcoholism, despair and suicide.

Kiki and Man Ray were lovers for eight years, but both had other lovers, and affairs after they broke up. Both before and after, she modeled for many of his masterpieces.

She wrote her memoirs "Kiki's Memoirs" in 1929.  It was published in France with introductions by Fujita and Hemingway.  It was banned in the United States.

She was beautiful.  She was raunchy.  She was a free spirit.

She lived life on her own terms.

If that appeals to you, so will this book. It is well written, with great illustrations.  Many nudes.