"from the cunt to the head is/ a Mobius strip/ that connects us to death" --Eleni Sikelianos, excerpted from "Notes Toward the Township of Cause of Trouble (Venus Cabinet Revealed)"
Last night, I fed a passel of fantastic-- and very accommodating-- women spinach lasagna and cupcakes.
Unfortunately, about two hours before the girls were due to arrive, my kitchen sink swallowed something it found not at all tasty and began spewing up a soup of ground-up lemon rinds and dishsoap. Over the course of the evening, the sink sort of drained out (leaving a vomitous-looking sludge behind). But, it seems it drained right into the bottom of my dishwasher. So now, I'm awaiting a plumber and hoping my landlord will pick up the bill, with a cesspool for a dishwasher. My essential anal retention prevented me from sleeping well, as I was all too aware, all night long, that the mountain of unwashed dishes awaited my attention this morning. It was all I could do to fight the 4:30 AM temptation to haul the whole operation into the bathroom and wash them in the bathtub.
In any case, I'd like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the extended GBC that overlooked the warzone depicted below.
Ooof! Repugnant!
In case any of you feel the need for a souvenir of the evening (I have souvenirs of my own aplenty... you girls left 5 unopened bottles of wine here! Anytime you want to come over and help me out with those, just let me know.), here's my quasi-improvised lasagna recipe:
Marjorie's (not remotely vegan) Spinach Lasagna
For the sauce:
3 tbsp olive oil 2 small yellow onions, chopped 4 cloves garlic, minced 4 ripe plum tomatoes, chopped 2 cans tomato paste 2 28 oz cans diced or crushed tomatoes salt (preferably kosher) fresh-ground pepper (preferably tellicherry) 1 tbsp dried marjoram or oregano 2 tbsp dried basil 1 tbsp ground fennel 3 tbsp tamari or soy sauce (this is my little secret for brightening the tomatoes-- sssshhhh no telling!) 1 cup red wine 1+ cup heavy cream (to cut the acidity-- I usually just add until it tastes right)
Saute the onions in the olive oil until they're soft. Add the garlic and saute for another minute or so. Add the fresh tomatoes and cook down for another 5 minutes or so. Add all the paste and canned tomatoes, along with the herbs, salt and pepper. I usually put in quite a lot of pepper and go skimpy on the salt because the soy sauce adds saltiness, but with more flavor than just plain salt. Heat it all the way through so that it's bubbling a little. Then stir in the soy sauce and the red wine. When that's all mixed up, add the heavy cream. Simmer in on low while you put together everything else. This actually makes WAY more than you need for one pan of lasagna, so you can freeze the leftover and put it on future pasta dishes (or, if you're avoiding gluten, you can put it on spaghetti squash).
Preheat the oven to 350. Start with a generous layer of sauce on the bottom of your 9x14 pyrex pan. I usually use the no-boil noodles, just because it saves a step here. Layer noodles, spinach filling, noodles, sauce, spinach filling, noodles, sauce. Then, slice fresh mozzerella into 1/8-inch-thick rounds and arrange them on the top of the lasagna. Grate fresh parmesan over the top of the whole thing-- enough to create a cheesy sort of crust on the top. Your pan will be VERY full, so I recommend putting it inside a cookie sheet or something to prevent sauce from overflowing onto your oven floor. Bake for about 40 minutes, or until the cheeses start to brown. Remove the pan from the oven, cover with aluminum foil, return it to the oven and bake for another 15 minutes or so. Remove from the oven and let it stand for 10 minutes to set up before serving. Voila! Tasty goodness!
This is just about the only dish I've made so often that I've pretty much fool-proofed it. And memorized it. Initially, it was an experiment when I was really learning how to cook for myself when I was right out of college. It evolved into the first-ever recipe that I made up all by myself. My mom published a version of this recipe in The Tennessean a few years ago, but I think I make the sauce better now than I did when I first invented it.
No, Mom! You're not allowed to but cayenne in it! Just add more tellicherry. I promise. It's better.
In general, I think chocolate is a fairly mundane ingredient for a dessert. On the rare occasion that I order a dessert from a restaurant, it's hardly ever whatever chocolate thing they have on the menu. I've had chocolate before. I know what it tastes like. If I'm gonna pay $8 for a rammikin of pudding or a slab of cake, I want it to be something I've never tasted before. And chocolate's such a bully! It overpowers pretty much anything else you can put with it. So why bother?
This is not to say, of course, that I don't like chocolate. I keep bars of Valrhona 85% on my desk at work and my homemade chocolate ganache ice cream is famous (if only in familial circles). So, I figure, if you're gonna do chocolate, you should do it simply, cleanly... but intensely.
Hold onto your hair, folks. These little guys don't fuck around.
I'm home in DC now, but I still have several films about which I want to write-- mostly because most of them won't find theatrical release and I hope to encourage my reader(s) to seek them out via alternative venues. Though, certainly, some are more worthy than others.
Case in point: I took my mom to see a documentary called Spiritual Revolution. She's always got at least one toe dipped into the metaphysical community here in Nashville, and I thought she might be more amenable to sitting through an exploration of non-mainstream spirituality than most of my more skeptical friends. Unfortunately, though this movie was, indeed, billed as "a look at Eastern spirituality in the Western World," it's really not much beyond a precursory billboard for meditation. If I'm going to be fair, I would say that this movie could serve as a really great primer for folks who've never ever ever thought to consider the basic tenets of Buddhist and Hindu mysticism. But, as I said, my mom's been thinking these thoughts for quite a while... and I've also done my fair share of poking around in Eastern philosophy (such that I've been able to determine that, while the focus is often different than Judeo-Christian thinking, it's still religion and therefore has a bunch of rules for living that I'll never be capable of adopting wholesale). Although I'm certainly nothing beyond a novice, neither of us learned anything new-- or anything we both weren't deeply familiar already.
In fact, most of the talking heads (assorted gurus and psychology scholars) didn't say much of anything that was even remotely profound. They spoke in abstracted soundbites without delving into any of the real meaty explorations of the mind with which they have all doubtlessly been engaged for some years. They occasionally hinted at anecdotes from their own lives, but I never grasped a full understanding of how these people came to believe that they'd gained greater access to peace, enlightenment, what have you, than your average churchgoer. I blame not so much the interviewees for this flaw in the film as I do the whole interview process and, probably, the editing. They were clearly asked questions designed to flatter them (oh, Swami! You're so enlightened! How'd you get that way?) and that merely skimmed the surfaces of their studies. And if they offered any more complicated, nuanced or scholarly answers, those responses were doubtlessly omitted from the final cut. Dumb editorial decision, I'd say.
And then I encountered a couple of structural and attitudinal problems that have really stuck in my craw. If I'm going to be honest, I'd probably have to admit that, had I not sat through the director's Q&A after, I might not be quite so irked, but man! He really hit a couple sour notes. First of all, he explained how this film came to be included in the NaFF. While NaFF has hosted countless religious documentaries, most of them have poured forth from a Christian perspective--- assuming that those sorts of films will find greater audience in this here Bible Belt. Well, this dude (the director) said that when NaFF approached him, he balked. Nashville? Who in Nashville, with all the country music and bumpkins, is gonna be open to a film about Buddhist meditation? And he seemed shocked to have found a receptive audience here. Well, I got news for you, dude! Not all of Nashville is composed of rednecks and banjo strummers. I hate it that comments like his make me feel so defensive about this city in which I've spent so many years, but honestly! Nashville's like Hipster Central these days and I just don't know when this town's going to outlive its reputation. Really, the only people around here who wear cowboy boots do so with irony. Wise up, rest of the country! Nashvillians ain't all the inbred hayseed Christian zealots you might think we are. So, immediately, even though he thanked the audience (smugly, as far as I could tell) for "helping him break through his own stereotypes," I was immediately annoyed that he'd been so uncouth as to bring them up in the first place.
And then this poor woman in the audience asked a question about why there were so few women in the movie. She had an accent and didn't articulate her question very well. But he copped a little attitude and blustered, "Well, what about the whole section in there ABOUT women?" And it was all I could do to not be completely rude and to hold my tongue. I really just wanted to blurt out, "Oh, you mean the little ghetto-chapter you set up for them?" But he'd never have understood what I meant. Here's the woman problem in this film as I see it: he said he wanted to approach the film from the stance of tradition and then move into newer developments in the field of Eastern religious study in America. OK, that's fine. But women's participation in Eastern religion is new? Are you sure about that? Isn't Kuan Yin, the mother of the Buddha, one of the primary figures in the religion? Along with assorted other female boddhisatvas? And, as Kuan Yin supposedly birthed Siddhartha, wouldn't she actually predate Buddhism? His is a problematic conceit, to say the least.
Anyway, instead of integrating the women's stories throughout, he made a special section in which he interviewed them-- and then, with deplorably limited vision and understanding with regard to their actual roles in their field, he asked them only questions that pertained to the female experience of being a spiritual seeker in a so-called male-dominated world. Or, at least, these were the only responses that he included in the film, so I can only assume that they were not asked anything more interesting. They were not asked to tell their stories of religious epiphanies, nor were they asked to contribute to the greater discussions with regard to modern science and meditation or anything else.
Their voices were only present so that they could say that, yes, indeed, Buddhism and Hinduism are still primarily male endeavors and we women have won our status only by hardscrabbling and and putting up with marginalization. And this line of thinking can only perpetuate their marginalization within the religions. So, ultimately, despite his smug self-congratulations that he had, indeed, had the brilliant idea to ask some of the girls to join in the documentarian fun, he's done nothing but ghettoize their experiences, simply by setting aside a chapter for them, rather than including their contributions as equal perspectives within the whole. Really, it was his smugness in his response to that poor woman from the audience that irked me so-- moreso, even, than the film itself.
I realize that those less versed in this sort of gender politics make this mistake in documentaries-- and more commonly, in TV programs like Dateline, 20/20 and pretty much everything you'll ever see on the History Channel-- all the time. I see it a lot and yeah, it's annoying, but those programs are meant to be consumable by a largely uninformed public. So, it would be understandable if the director had pointedly made such a concession for the sake of his audience. But he made it clear that this editorial decision was made on the basis of obliviousness, rather than audience awareness.
So, here's how my imaginary conversation with this director might have gone (were I as articulate in spontaneous conversation as I am when I have time to think and write):
A play in one act:
Dramatis personae: Me (to be played by Jessica Alba) Smug Director (to be played by a slovenly gas station attendant from Neptune, NJ) Lady in the Audience (to be played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) My Mom (to be played by Mrs. Potts, the teapot in the DisneySleeping Beauty, wearing a bindi)
Lady: But what about the women?
Him: (rolls eyes) Don't you remember the whole section on women?
Me: (interrupting rudely) Oh, you must mean that chapter you devised for them. The one that's nothing beyond an textual ghetto?
Him: (blankly, chewing the end of a drinking straw) Huh? What do you mean?
Me: Rather than integrating their individual experiences into the greater collective experience, you set the women in your film aside and provided them an outlet in which they were only permitted to discuss "issues important to women."
Him: (blinks four times, wiggling the drinking straw between his thumb and index finger) I didn't mean it that way.
Me: (getting pink, talking too fast, gesticulating a little too aggressively) Oh, I know you didn't intend it to be that way. But you have, in fact, created a structural implication that merely perpetuates the sense of female marginalization within your film. Your obliviousness kind of makes it worse. Because now it's an oversight-- a political blindspot. You didn't even consider that they might have something to contribute other than complaints that the system is biased against them? Did it ever once occur to you to ask them the same questions you asked the rest of your talking heads?
Him: Huh? (six blinks, followed by a George W-esque squint. He drops the drinking straw.)
Me: (audible sigh, with jaw set with resignation) Right. (Aside to My Mom, the teapot, who has the bareliest whisper of steam emerging from around her lid) And this joker thinks he's so evolved? Let's stomp out. Noisily.
My Mom and Me: (simultaneous bird flippage. Exeunt theater.)
Fin
Despite all the generally shoddy craftsmanship at work in this film, I have to admit that there was actually a tiny firecracker within it that jangled some other bells in my head. A section of this film pertains to a program called Inner Kids, based at UCLA, that's really pretty nifty. This is a program designed to expose kids, some of whom are quite troubled, to assorted self-soothing practices, including meditation. In some of the footage, one of the leaders has the kids partake in this interesting little exercise. He has the kids hold ice cubes in the palms of their hands. He asks them to just sit with the sensation, trying not to judge it as good or bad, even if it hurts a little. Now, I'm super-sensitive to cold things. Holding an ice cube is really very painful for me. I can touch hot things to the point where my skin gets damaged before it really hurts, but I have no tolerance for cold. So, I really understood what this exercise was attempting to show these kids-- that being, if you can just sit with an experience, and turn off the fear-of-pain mechanism in your brain, you open yourself more fully to the experience itself.
Now. Wanna know of what that reminded me? S&M. Yep. Sure did. Well, in particular, the theory behind the transcendence of submission. Dominating holds very little appeal for me. In my day-to-day life, I feel pretty self-posessed. I'm hopelessly independent and don't much like it when people make decisions for me. When I've been put in supervisory positions at work, I feel no compunctions against telling other people what to do-- and I respect the people who report to me, so I like to think they respect me in return. But the practice of submission fascinates me. The process by which I'd make myself-- body and mind-- so utterly available and vulnerable to another person both thrills me and makes me nervous as hell. In my opinion, being a bottom requires far more mental fortitude than being a top does. Submitting means enduring whims beyond your control-- whims that could possibly cause you physical pain. It means sitting still with yourself until you figure out how to quell your petulant rebellions. And it means forgoing all self-preservation instincts in favor of trusting another person exhaustively -- someone outside of you who has his or her own free will. It's not easy.
Recently, I quietly added a new blog to my blogroll. This woman over at Beautiful, depraved is plumbing through some truly fascinating netherregions. I'm very drawn to her work here because, not only is her writing limpid and exact, but she pushes beyond simple smuttiness to finger her way into the psyschology of all that is sexual. This post in particular describes the exact thing I'm attempting to articulate.
Here's a paragraph that I find particularly relevant:
After a beating, I was malleable. Soft. Suppliant. Full of feeling. After each blow, he had me thank him. I didn’t understand the power of this until one day I was at my gym after a workout, in the communal showers. I turned the faucet all the way to cold and I felt the water hit my skin. Something curious had happened. I didn’t distinguish anymore that the water was cold or that it was uncomfortable. I was only aware of it as a sensation. I had no judgment of it, only the experience of noticing it was cold. I did not flinch, I did not back away, I accepted it completely. That’s when I realized that I’d ceased to let the fear of pain prevent me from living. Or more precisely, from loving. The thank yous became a thank you to life, and to all that it might bring me.
Do you see the connection? Yielding your own autonomy and allowing your lover to beat you or holding an ice cube in your hand-- it's the same instinct. The instinct towards transcendence. But also, it's the instinct toward mindfulness. And being present. And living as fully as possible. And it's perhaps exactly why sex, as a mental exercise, fascinates me beyond all other aspects of the human experience. Sex is such a singular experience that it consumes one's focus whole. It's at once unequivocally physical and, if it's good, unreservedly intellective. It blows the roof off your crown chakra, right?
So, Spiritual Revolution is a poorly founded, poorly edited film that belongs on basic cable. But it's subject matter is important. And it bears relevance to so many other ideas about which I ponder frequently. I wish the thing was better-made. I really do. Because I do think it's important that information about Eastern thought be made available to any and all comers. Hopefully, smarter filmmakers will come along and do just that. And quick.
Here are the results of my first recipe test. These are the White Chocolate Wasabi Cupcakes with Plum Sake Filling. The filling is DEE-lish! The icing, however, is tres sweet to my palate and you can't taste the wasabi in the cake-- not even a little bit. That's rather annoying as that stuff had my eyes watering profusely while I was mixing it into a paste. Still, the sesame seed garnish adds something unusual that I like quite a lot. And they're pretty, eh?
Baking is soul-soothing. Certainly, I needed this morning's kitchen activities to calm my nerves after last night. If I could give Damon Packard a cupcake, maybe he'd be a happier guy and less prone to spewing rancor far and wide. What do you think? Good idea?
UPDATE: When I tried these the first time, I made them with Valrhona white chocolate and I've decided I don't much like the flavor of that particular white chocolate. The second batch didn't come out as pretty because I don't have as good a set of frosting tips as my mom does, but I used El Rey white chocolate. El Rey has a nice, nuttier, more natural vanilla flavor and so they came out much tasting better. Plus, I added lemon juice to both the filling and the icing, hoping to take the edge off all that rich sweetness. That helps, too.
If the point or art-- or any aesthetic experience, really-- is to stimulate some reaction within its audience, then Damon Packard's film Reflections of Evil is successful art, indeed. However, from an audience's perspective, I tend to think that art that does nothing beyond work you over for every emotional trigger you've got is really rather base. I would put such things as this most recent generation of slasher films in that category, along with, say, porn. There's nothing really wrong with those types of films, per se... it's just that they're designed to signal your most primal fear instincts or your most primal libidinous instincts, without really engaging your mind. But they do illicit reactions and therefore, it can be argued that they serve their purpose. And, I suppose, so does Packard's film. But I personally can take only minimal satisfaction from a film that goes right for the throat of instinct, bypassing completely my more mental maneuverings.
Sometimes I lose track of the fact that I'm actually a pretty sensitive person. I sit down in front of most movies, immediately don my critic's cap and set to work. As I've said before, I'm not too interested in being entertained just for the sake of entertainment, so I play a game of mining films for their assumptions and underpinnings-- which is something that's a lot more fun to me than just letting them wash over me. But my critical stance does a remarkable job of establishing a certain distance. I have some friends who tell me they don't like to watch movies that are "depressing" or "negative" or disturbing in any way because they take those feelings home with them. I find that I can allow a film to affect me while it's playing, but as soon as the lights come up, this critical stance kicks into gear and works as a filter, such that I can pretty much release the emotional impact without much stress. However, every once in a while, something really scratches-- or in this case, gouges-- its way under my skin. So accustomed to my detachment am I that I'm sometimes surprised when the emotional stuff comes barreling up to the surface.
So, when I erupted into spastic tears on the car ride home from Damon Packard's film last night, I was really caught off guard. That means it's probably high time to figure out what was going on in this film that made me feel so utterly wretched afterwards. No promises that what I have to say will make any sense, though.
There's really no way to give a synopsis as it doesn't have much plot. Basically, it's just relentless footage of this slovenly, derelict fellow with a pillow up his shirt to make him appear even more obesely repulsive. He's wearing 7 or 8 layers of shirts, with some of them tied around his waist or pooling at his feet. He often has food smeared on his face and his hair is wild and greasy. This is, of course, Packard himself, playing a vagrant, paranoid, furious street peddler, trying to sell $5 watches while constantly being assaulted, or assaulting other people. Interspersed, you find footage of a girl wearing a floaty pink nightgown, sometimes wearing a gorilla mask and bleeding from the mouth, and some clips from 70s era TV promos. But for the most part, this watch-seller character interacts with myriad tweaking homeless junkies, angry dogs and other folks who just seem up for a fight. His paranoia mounts rapidly and the steady blue streak of profanity throughout creates nothing short of an onslaught of anxiety. Now, I can handle my fair share of foul language-- it's not the words unto themselves, for sure. But when you sit through nearly two hours of listening to people shout, "I'm gonna kill you, motherfucker," it has a way of invading you.
And speaking of shouted "motherfuckers," that's not the only thing going on in the sound design of this film. Every one of Packard's gestures and movements is accompanied by these awful grunting and crackling bodily sounds. Clearly, it's mean to amplify the sense of his own discomfort within his body. Every time he eats, he's dubbed over the sound with this ravenous animalistic belching noise that really makes the whole thing seem far more disgusting than it really is. There's one scene in which he digs through a series of leftovers in a refrigerator. He finds nothing that's really too gross-- a tub of olives, some wedges of hard cheese, something that might have been meatballs. But he's dubbed in these sloshing, slurping, sucking sounds such that you're pretty convinced you're looking at puddles of putrescence.
And don't get me started on the vomiting. Within about 30 seconds of this film's opening credits, I'd already figured out I'd spend most of it with my head buried in Jon's chest, trying to plug my ears. The prevalence of puke in this film, though... good god. All who know me understand that my anxieties around vomit are not to be taken lightly. I once heard a woman puking in one of the bathroom stalls at work and, forever after, that stall was dead to me. Actually, I felt quite shaky even going into the one next to it. I'm not sure I understand my phobia, but it's pretty real and films that use vomit for comic effect kinda piss me off. It's not funny, beyond the most juvenile of levels and it simply makes me want to bolt from the theater. However, in this film, there was so much vomit and with such frequency that I *almost* became numb to it. Except there was that damn soundtrack. Oh, my god-- the splattering and gagging sounds? So loud? It was inescapable and I felt trapped there, held in statis, for 2 hours, abandoned with nothing but my phobia for company.
So, I don't really think it's possible to watch a film like this and maintain a critical distance. I left the theater feeling totally victimized by and infected with this film's vitriol. I felt like I'd been on the receiving end of every ounce of this man's soul-dumpage. I don't really begrudge him his need to express such things in a creative format, but I'm not real sure I deserved to have it land in my lap. I didn't know what I was getting into when Jon and I chose to see this film. And it probably serves me right for not googling first. I gather the entire thing is available on the internet-- but I'm not going to link it because I really wouldn't wish it on any of my readers. But now, I've seen it and I can't erase those images from my head. Sooner or later, they'll fade a little and be replaced with something else, but right now, they're tormenting me. They're in me and I don't know how to purge them. So I wonder, why did this man want to do such a thing to me? And by "me," I don't really mean me personally, but rather, why would a person feel the need to assault an audience in such a fashion? It's a sort of artist-on-audience aggression that I can't imagine to be all that satisfying for the artist.
It's my fault that I didn't get up and leave, as very quickly, I ascertained that this movie wasn't going to have a positive effect on my psyche. But I still feel like it's unfair that this man created something that I feel helpless against internalizing. In his Q&A, he talked a little about his guerrilla distribution methods. Obviously, this film could never find an actual distributor, so he did stuff like hire homeless people to stand around and hand out copies of the DVD to unsuspecting Los Angelenos. Or he'd leave stacks of them around the city. And he mailed out hundreds of copies to random celebrities. To me, that says that he's pretty invested inflicting his repugnance and fury on other people. And, yeah, it makes me kind of resentful... and it makes me question his fundamental morality. I chose to see this thing and have to admit that I kinda did it to myself, but what about all those people who just slid the thing into the DVD players and got nothing but a load of puke, both metaphoric and literal, right in the face? Did they really deserve it?
Ugh. I give up. I can't really process this movie at all. I feel, perhaps, as though I survived something, but I'm not exactly sure how to handle its lingering effects. All I know is that I want it out of me. But Packard lobbed a demon at me and it's taken hold. Shy of exorcism, it seems I'll be carrying it with me, obsessively, for a bit.
