curse of the tatsoi

In the midst of cold, recession, and the general barrenness of winter, it’s lovely to have a freezer and cupboard full of food that we grew and preserved ourselves back in the summer. We did pretty well this time: canned tomatoes, canned green tomatoes, turnip pickles (you know you want some), canned pear chutney (we didn’t grow the pears, but my uncle did), stacks of frozen poblanos and jalapenos, frozen pesto, a few bags of frozen chard, green beans, and beet greens. We’re likely to run out of the tomatoes in the next month or so, and we’re making pretty good time through the peppers too, in spite of the staggering amount we managed to put up. But however you look at it, it’s a nice stash.

Then there’s the tatsoi.

Tatsoi seemed like such a good idea last March. This small, delicate Chinese mustard green is bok choi’s cute cousin. When it’s really young, it’s lovely in salads with toasted sesame oil. When it gets a little more mature, you toss it in stir-fries. The flavor is sort of a delicate peppery cabbagey something, subtle, ever so slightly kicky. It’s a sassy little brassica. Nice, if you like that kind of thing.

I do, or did, at any rate. My friend Sarah, on the other hand, with whom we garden, wanted nothing to do with it. She likes her greens with about as much kick as a béchamel sauce. Butter lettuce is her speed. However, the garden space in her backyard is large, and having plenty of space for her milder choices, she didn’t begrudge me the huge, long row of tatsoi I put in, all the while rhapsodizing in a superior manner about the greatness of spicy greens that I was sure she could come to love if she would only open her mind.

My comeuppance has arrived in the form of a freezer that spews pint bags of frozen tatsoi at my head whenever it is opened. I’ll be headed for something way more inviting: the pesto, perhaps, or the smoky Spanish paprika I keep fresh in there, and the tatsoi will assert itself. The message is always the same: Ignore me, and I will still be here in April when the farmer’s market is full of arugula and baby spinach and mesclun salad mix. I will gather frost, and acquire freezer burn flavor, and you know damn well that you will still be too much of a Mennonite to throw me away. You will be forcing me down in May, and in June you will desperately invent a bread recipe involving whirled tatsoi that will make everyone in your house throw up.

Sometime around the third week of August, when I was spending every other evening cramming steamed tatsoi into baggies, I questioned the wisdom of planting a huge crop of a green that is most at home in cuisines about which I know next to nothing. Every year I resolve to learn more about Chinese food, and somehow I always fail; it’s just too vast. I can make you the same pan-pseudo-Asian tofu stir-fry that you will find in the home of every vegetarian, and I have been known to toy with the odd Sichuan peppercorn, but really, I have no clue. I exhausted my tatsoi potential in June. By August, I was well into my usual late-summer Mediterranean tomato orgy and wanted nothing to do with the stuff.

I do not believe people who tell me that suffusing plants with “good energy” makes them grow better. Every time I sawed at those tatsoi stems, I sent them horrid thoughts: Die, you relentless bastards, or worse, I WISH YOU WERE CHARD. And yet we were harvesting it by the bushelful on a weekly basis. I could have let the whole patch go to seed and no one would have missed it, but I’m a Midwesterner and I don’t do things like that. If there is edible vegetable matter to be harvested in my vicinity and a workable means of preserving it, I know my duty.

We eat a lot of greens in this house; kale, collards, napa cabbage, turnip greens, chard—we love them all, and it requires so little effort to make them good. And generally speaking, all these things hold up well in the freezer, and have a thousand culinary uses. But all we really have left is this effing tatsoi, which, due to that squirrely brassica edge it has, cannot be workably substituted for any of these other lovely greens in any recipe worth its salt.

Last night Eric made a Thai curry, as he generally does at least once a week. When it comes to Mexican or Thai food, my job is to cook the rice and wash the dishes; his versions are much better and I am hopeless with coconut milk. I did offer to make greens on the side, however. “Oh yeah, that’d be great!” he enthused, perhaps thinking that I had some nice kale in the fridge. I opened the freezer and reached for a baggie. “Oh,” he said. “You mean that.”

While he was finishing up I did my standard tatsoi preparation: a little chili sesame oil, a few crushed Sichuan peppercorns, a quick sauté. Eric finished his curry, which was golden and fabulous, scattered with exquisite flecks of cilantro. I’m talking cooking magazine cover material here; I don’t how he did it, but it was perfect. My tatsoi, on the other hand, looked like something that Popeye might dump out of a can, a deep green muck scattered with stringy stems. It tasted only slightly better than it looked. But maybe that’s just because we’re so bloody sick of it.

I haven’t counted, but I think there are at least twenty more pints of it to go. If there are any frozen tatsoi experts reading, now would be the time to step forward with your wisdom.

december is often viral

I promise I’m still around. First there was Christmas, and now I’m sick with the same nasty cold that has infected almost every other member of my extended family. I’m sneezing and coughing and my throat feels like a cheese grater. (I’m not sure exactly what I mean by that, but it sounds awful, and awful is what I’m going for.) I’m not really in the mood to write or do much of anything except hang out on the couch and knit. So I’ll post more once I’m feeling better. Happy holidays to everyone. ☺

wish list

I’ve decided it’s officially time to lighten up. No more serious political brooding. No more complaining about the media. Nor more weighing in on important issues of the day. That Rick Warren inauguration thing? Not even paying attention. LALALALALA. I am moving to Planet Oblivion. Or Planet Christmas. Or Planet Entertainment Weekly.

Yes, let’s go with the last. I flatter myself that I am highbrow because I read Entertainment Weekly instead of People. I don’t have a working TV and hardly see any movies (with this notable exception), so I don’t know what the heck they’re on about most of the time, at least not since Battlestar Galactica went on hiatus and I stopped watching Mad Men because I became preoccupied with ways to murder the male characters. But I still feel more with it reading EW than reading People, because it requires less knowledge of all the various Haydens and Haylees and Mileys of the younger generation. And right now I prefer it to Salon because even though I do know what they’re talking about on Salon, I wish I didn’t. So in that escapist spirit, here’s my wish (and anti-wish) list for next year.

1) I want Lhasa de Sela to come out with a new album. Last month I went on a jag and listened to The Living Road approximately eight times per day. It was healthy.

2) I want an Arrested Development movie, dammit. What is Ron Howard doing wasting his time with all this serious and thought provoking Frost/Nixon nonsense? Along with similar-minded friends, I have been reduced to getting my Jason Bateman fix from Mock-a-Movie Knitting Night featuring Teen Wolf Too. Lord deliver us. I want more Michael Bluth. Now.

3) I don’t want Adama or Roslin to be the final Cylon, unless there’s a really damn good explanation.

4) I want to see a lot of Michelle Obama, minus the fascination with her clothes/fitness level. But that might take this out of the realm of entertainment and into news. None of that. LALALALALA.

5) I want that dishy bald British Mark Strong to star in a movie I can actually watch, one that doesn’t involve guns, torture, bombs, or Satanic rituals, though I don’t hold out much hope, because he seems to be a career villain. For the uninitiated, this is the guy who tore out George Clooney’s fingernails in Syriana. Or so I’m told. The movies I have seen him in, he has been the most riveting thing on screen. Recently, while pursuing weightier news stories—really, I swear—I happened to discover that he stars in that new-ish Ridley Scott movie where lots of shit blows up, Body of Lies. (Really bad title.) I am this close to watching it because his performance in it is so well reviewed, but I dunno. On the up side, I don’t think he tears out anyone’s fingernails. On the down side, I think it’s probably still the type of movie where bad things happen to fingers. It’s about spies and terrorists, never favorite subjects of mine, plus it has Russell Crowe (ick) and Leonardo DiCaprio (yawn). Is an ick plus a yawn worth it for one serious yum? These are the kinds of questions I ask myself.

6) I know this is not strictly about entertainment, but I’ll include anything frivolous here: I want boot cut pants to stay in style. Yes, of all things to concern me, this. Why am I worried? Because I was just downtown and I saw no less than twenty young women wearing high fur-lined boots over top of their skintight and just profoundly ass-hugging jeans. Boot-cut jeans could not have fit into those boots. Now, this is all fine and good, and I am all over the high boots thing; I am pretty in love with my own pair. But if this boots-over-jeans look is to become the next big trend, the boot cut pants will disappear from the stores and once I wear out all my jeans I will have to buy stovepipe pants again even though I have vowed to stay with boot cuts forever and ever. Can’t we women just agree that we all look better in boot cuts and should keep wearing them so they will always be in the stores? Because it’s true—young, old, slender, curvy, grandmas, granddaughters—we all know we look better in boot cuts. No one looked good in the eighties. Trust me. I just watched Teen Wolf Too.

7) I want to not be called “ma’am” by any individual, particularly if he or she works in a liquor store.

greed, fear, hope

ETA: Relevant and new: this and this.

At 6:40 yesterday morning, I staggered downstairs to the kitchen in search of tea and breakfast. As usual, Eric had already tuned the ancient radio perched atop our refrigerator to NPR, despite the fact that the only NPR station we can get from that radio is the local one—we both prefer the Kansas City station—and the local Morning Edition anchor missed his calling hosting Music from the Hearts of Space. With his flat, unappealing voice, slow delivery and musical selections that range from contemplative synthesizer mood numbers to Celtic-inspired New Age nocturnes, he has the singular ability to make a dark, cold, early winter morning seem like the threshold to a heartless underworld.

After the latest depressing weather report came the latest depressing story of insanely wealthy people exploiting less wealthy people to become even more insanely wealthy themselves. Usually I half-listen to at least half an hour of Morning Edition, but this morning I lost my stomach for it about five minutes in. It’s ugly to hear about all this naked greed, so close to the holidays.

More tiring even than the unfolding of these sad events is the endless analysis about whether or not Americans have it in us to get out this mess. This is the real reason why I keep resolving to go on a news freeze (and never do, somehow, but I have cut down). The other night I told Eric that I felt as though every other headline I saw could be summed up like this: “Proposed Solution May Not be Good Enough to Fix Humungous Problem.”

Part of what pisses me off about the coverage of the Blagojevich scandal is that I sense mainstream journalists clamoring for a chance to feel morally relevant, and I feel unsympathetic to their desires. On all the major moral crises of the past eight years, most of these people have completely dropped the ball on us. Our government has been run by liars, and rather than trying to discern the truth, the media, in lieu of actual journalism, has defaulted to an utterly lazy form of relativism that people like Karl Rove know exactly how to manipulate. People disagree about whether or not the media as a whole swings right or left, but Americans do seem to more or less agree that the media isn’t worthy of respect. And journalists probably know this. I suspect some of them are searching for a little redemption at the moment, though that might be my imagination.

Which is why Blagojevich is such a godsend for them. Unlike all the weird, subterranean crimes of the Bush administration, the Blago shit is a gimme. Here is this feckless raving man-child who engaged in blatantly corrupt dealings while being taped by the FBI. He is a cartoon of greed and avarice, the qualities that we know to be at the core of our national meltdown. It requires no discernment or journalistic skill whatsoever to display eloquent outrage at such a cut-and-dry case of douchebaggery. But it probably feels good. It makes them feel like righteous whistle-blowers. It must be fun for them to play that role—it must almost feel as though they are actually doing their jobs. Nothing feels better than ranting about crimes that are more or less out in the open, their offensiveness agreed upon by almost everyone.

It’s really a shame there are no FBI tapes of Bush and Rumsfeld authorizing the use of torture on military detainees and replete with saucy entitled ranting and nasty expletives. As a matter of fact, there’s a Senate Armed Services Committee report, released last week to no media aplomb whatsoever, that makes it clear that prisoners have been dying horribly in US custody in Iraq because of specific decisions about prisoner treatment made by high-level Bush officials, Bush himself included. I did not have the stomach to read all of it, but what I read is utterly damning. And processing it requires a grownup sense of ethics and a grownup attention span. Blagojevich is so much easier.

To me, the most obvious symptom of the mainstream media’s abandonment of their moral obligation to inform the public is their incessant tendency to spin meta news. Thus the question is not, for example, “Is there any evidence implicating Obama in Blagojevich’s wrongdoing?” Because the answer to that question is thus far—and likely to remain—a very boring no, the question has become, “Will Obama escape the taint of Blagojevich?” This is where they set aside facts and evidence and speculate about what direction the narrative will take. Doing this, in and of itself, shapes the narrative in a certain direction. It’s probably unavoidable that the media is going to shape such narratives to a large extent, but is it too much to ask that they do so responsibly, with a sense of history and proportion and respect for the evidence, rather than through ludicrously speculative sensationalism that is actually a thinly-veiled pontification about how they themselves are going to present and interpret the news? Is it just me, or is there a gigantic vacuum in the middle of this system? A vacuum that should be filled with something resembling integrity?

The Blago part of this rant is probably a little dated already. The story, or at least the wannabe-Obama-linkage part of the story, seems to be losing some steam, and with more bleak economic crap coming out every day that can’t be ignored, there isn’t room in the headlines anyway. The American people seem to be too stressed out about money to care much about this silliness.

But here’s what I wish we cared more about: serious accountability. Not symbolic accountability, where we find a temporary whipping boy like Blagojevich to whale on, and then, once we have our righteous fix, forget about all the other vile behavior that has gone unchecked. I thought that I’d be in a more forgiving mood at the end of the Bush administration, with such a fine president-elect as we have. The conventional political wisdom seems to be that elections are all the accountability we need, and since Bush’s party was trounced, those of us who would like to see Bush and his people prosecuted for their war crimes are being excessively vengeful. But since when is the administration of justice under due process equal to vengeance? Have you ever met a Republican who would jive with such an interpretation when it came to, say, a mugger in the inner city?

The mainstream media was complicit in Bush’s crimes. Most of the Democrats in Congress were complicit as well. Maybe that’s why this accountability thing is so difficult.

I have a lot of faith in Obama’s moral guideposts, and that gives me hope. But Obama isn’t our government; he’s just the guy we elected president. If we want to restore the health of our democracy, if we want to model for the world a way of holding criminal leaders to account that is based in law and not vengeance, if we want to have a reasonable degree of faith that this kind of administration will not plunder our country and our planet again, we need to hold these people to account for what they have done.*

“Let’s not focus on the past, let’s look to the future.” How many times have we been silenced with that platitude? How many times has Bush himself used variations of it? Let’s not dwell on past wrongs. Let’s not play the “blame game.” But how do we move forward if we don’t reckon with what’s happened? How do we avoid repeating these mistakes if we haven’t truly investigated why they happened in the first place?

I argue this from a place of hope. I believe America can be better than we are. But it sure would help if we could look at the recent past, if we could admit that as a nation, we really messed up, and honestly try to figure out how and why.

The media’s penchant for meta-narration is also in high gear over the questions of Bush’s legacy; how will he be remembered, etc, etc. I’m reminding myself of something my advisor at MSU told his class on 9/11/02—I think I’ve written about it before here, but I’ll repeat it. He told us: Don’t let the media narrate this anniversary for you. You experienced this tragedy; you own your own trauma. Remember it for yourself. I will not forget how awful so much of life under this administration was, how fearful these people made me, how much I grieved and how much I struggled to hold onto hope sometimes.

But I learned things, too. I learned that letting the government and the media prey on my tendency to fear moves me no closer to truth. I learned that hope is a conscious decision I make, that while circumstances may make it easier or harder to hope, ultimately I still have to make that decision for myself, and sometimes I have to make it again and again and again. I am using those lessons right now.

As individuals, we can’t do much to hold the Bush administration accountable for the past eight years. But we can recommit ourselves to building the kind of culture that contains more power in its goodness and mercy and justice and interdependence than can be shattered by greed or fear-mongering. Perhaps I’m naïve for believing that’s possible. But I know a lot of good people, and I’m going to focus more on them than I do on the news.

* I just read Glenn Greenwald’s column in Salon, and he said a lot of the same things, only with more force, eloquence, and information.

STEPHANIE SLAMS MEDIA

I need to go on a news freeze.

Under normal circumstances—if anything in the past eight years can be perceived as normal circumstances—I shield myself from the news, somewhat. I have gone through periods of up to a year where ten to fifteen minutes of All Things Considered and/or Morning Edition per day is all I take in. In general, overindulgence in news has caused me to vacillate between constant mid-level anxiety and grief paralysis, depending on what’s going on. I believe in staying well informed, but I know that if I spend lots of time every day taking in sad or frightening headlines from all over the planet, I will become depressed. I can only carry so many burdens at once. I am hard-wired for immediate empathy. I know people who can take in vast amounts of horrific information, digest it, form opinions about it, and build careers on it, without ever letting it ruin their evening. People like this think that documentaries about Halliburton are a fun way to spend Friday night. I admire them in some ways, but I am not that, and I have accepted that about myself.

The election got me started on a few more news sources than I used to consult. We still have no functioning TV, a situation I don’t regret, but at the height of election fever I did a daily online check of Salon, the Huffington Post, the New York Times, CNN, and Daily Kos. Since the election, I have cut down a lot. No more Daily Kos. No more CNN. I glance at the New York Times, but not much more. Salon I still read a lot of; Huffington Post I still at least check, though I usually don’t read more that an article or blog or two. I listen to NPR a fair bit.

There isn’t a single news source that isn’t irking me at this point. I have backslid a bit this week to glance at the mainstream stuff, which has predictably sent my blood pressure into the stratosphere with all the pseudo-journalism attempting to tie Obama to this Blagojevich crap. Has any politician in recent memory received as forceful an exoneration from political scandal as Obama got from Mr. Pottymouth’s rants against him on those tapes? Are we going to ignore our liquefying economy for untold weeks while supposedly qualified jackasses like Campbell Brown and Massimo Calabresi opine righteously about “taint”?

But it’s not just the Blago story that’s in my craw. It’s headlines in general. For example, Huffington Post. I admire some things about that publication, but their entire layout is dependent on sensationalism; their tabloid presentation encourages tabloid headlines. This morning I was particularly annoyed by Colin Powell Slams Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, which covered an appearance Powell made on CNN, an appearance in which he gave calm, measured, and completely non-inflammatory remarks about the damage he feels these individuals have done to the Republican party. “Slam”? Despite Powell’s calm demeanor throughout the interview, a stock photo of an open-mouthed Powell looking furious accompanied the story.

Then there was a Salon story today about the potential dangers posed by the release of undersea methane. The headline was apocalyptic: “Some geologists say rising temperatures will uncork vast deposits of undersea methane. If they're right, we're cooked.” This accompanied by an image of our planet in a frying pan. Uh…shit? I read to see if I should bother taking a shower this morning, or if we will all be burnt to a crisp by lunchtime. Read it yourself if you’re interested, but let’s just say the contents of the article, while certainly worrying and worthy of attention, were not worthy of the paralyzing, alarmist headline.

I appreciate a lot about Salon. I like their editor, Joan Walsh. They have some great writers. Usually I count on them for some integrity, which is why I get so pissed when they resort to cheap headlines. The most annoying one came earlier this week: “Can Democrats defend their gains in 2010?” Oh, for God’s sake. The Bush administration isn’t even out of office yet and we’re already playing this game? I thought of a scene in Battlestar Galactica in which President Roslin is being asked about her cancer prognosis by a reporter. “Madame President, how long do you have?” the reporter asks, in her best down-to-business, I’m-asking-the-important-questions tone of voice. “I don’t know,” the President fires back. “How long do you have?”

So, news freeze. I’m thinking I’ll do it. If I get lonely for the headlines, I’ll buy myself a ouija board.

december cheer

I decided last night that today would be a good day to hole up, forget about everything else, and write a long blog post about…something. It’s supposed to snow today; outside is gunmetal gray and bleakness; it would be all-too-easy to be mopey and spend this blog post on petty bitching about everything that is wrong. December can be a rough month for me if I’m not careful. I think most people feel the same way.

But you know, I’m not going to let myself go there. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from a decade-plus of Decembers as an alleged grown-up, it’s that you cannot reasonably expect December to do right by you if you spend all your spare time tyrannizing yourself and those around you with negativity and crankiness, hating your schedule, the weather, the state of the world, the state of your home, the surrounding culture. Two days before Thanksgiving I hyperventilated in a consignment shop that was blasting the most right-wing arrangement of “The Little Drummer Boy” known to God or man. I became enraged, then hopeless, then nauseous, then started all over again with rage. Determined to find a wool coat for less than thirty dollars, I tried to muscle my way through it. I was miserable; I hated everyone; I could not make eye contact with any store employees for fear of growling. I started having an argument in my head with Bill O’Reilly. Then I came to my senses and went to TJMaxx instead. It is possible to take control of these situations.

Why is December so…challenging? I’m not sure, exactly. Sometimes it seems like nostalgia for the holidays of my childhood might be the root of it. I don’t know. I don’t miss being a kid, but I do miss December being all about anticipation for the holidays. I miss my grandparents.

But there are antidotes to December broodiness. Here is the list I have honed over the past few years. Most are domestic in nature.

1) Exercise. Everything is better under the influence of endorphins. I am wed to my iPod Shuffle and the treadmill. (It’s too cold to run outside. I’m a wuss.)

2) Baking. I’m not a cookie baker—I leave that to my mom—but I do bread. Slow-fermented loaves, foccacia (which Eric insists upon calling fuck-uh-shuh), naan, crackers, quick bread: anything that requires a hot oven. The infusion of bread-baking smell throughout the house on a cold day is the most effective form of aromatherapy I know of. After I’m done with the oven I leave it open and then stand in front of it, soaking up the heat.

3) Hot local apple cider with a capful of bourbon. I call this a “hot toddy,” although the Scots would probably consider such a label to be heresy. No doubt they pour peat-flavored whisky in black tea and drink it for breakfast.

4) Constant music. No silence allowed. We don’t have a lot of Christmas music here, but all Baroque music sounds like Christmas music to me, and I have plenty of that. In the evenings we listen to everything else: Colombian salsa, flamenco, all kinds of jazz, lots and lots and lots of tango. Last night while making dinner I listened to Cesaria Evora’s Mar Azul, an album that counters everything that is wrong with winter in the Midwest. If you had to ask me what I think the voice of God sounds like, I’d say like her.

5) Knitting. I had to lay off of knitting for a few months back in summer and early fall because my tendonitis situation was so bad, but in the past month or so I’ve found that if I’m careful, take breaks and don’t go too fast, I can still do it. Suze went on a stash purge and sent me a bunch of cool yarn, so now I am making myself a sweater. That, in addition to the beautiful yarn she gave me in thanks for turning her recital pages, has caused the members of my knitting posse to ask if she will adopt them. She has become a sort of legend here, the Munificent Cousin of Stash. (For those of you of the non-knitting persuasion, the word “stash” does not mean that all knitters are hoarding reefer. We’re talking about yarn. If you did not already know this, you are what we call a Muggle.)

6) The Two Fat Ladies. After years of checking out old VHS tapes of these from the library, Eric and I splurged last week and bought each other the DVD box set for Christmas. We love these. They are absolutely the best antidote to winter blues to be found onscreen. I’ve raved about them before.

7) An unfocused but powerful sense of spiritual goodness: the solstice, Advent. Jesus has warned me to stay away from cheesy right-wing Christmas carol arrangements. “They just make you angry,” he said. “They make you judgmental and bitter. Go listen to Bach and bake something.” (Why, yes. Jesus speaks to me, and tells me exactly what I want to hear.)

what I end up doing when I am desperate not to clean the house

(But I did take in the recycling, by the way. It took two trips.)

So here’s the deal: like many if not most bookish liberals, I listen to a lot of NPR; it’s probably my primary news source. (Incidentally, are they covering this Canada situation, or what? Am I just missing those parts?) I discuss my favorite and least favorite newscasters with friends. I have “driveway moments.” I download NPR podcasts to put on my iPod while exercising. Often their coverage disappoints me; particularly during the election, I thought their major news shows sort of dropped the ball, giving maddeningly disproportionate airtime to a handful of supposedly undecided voters who were too stupid to be capable of choosing their own toothpaste. But I keep listening out of a) habit and b) the desire to avoid everything else on the radio, namely Top 40, right-wing Christians, and a student station specializing in the music of apathy and despair.

Hence my intimate familiarity with the many NPR musical themes. An inveterate NPR listener such as myself, particularly a musically inclined one, is bound to form opinions about such things, though my husband claims that as a postmodernist, I should be utterly impartial in my tastes. Whenever I go into a snit about some music I think is crap, he deadpans, “You should be an ethnomusicologist.” He really knows how to get to me.

What follows is for serious NPR geeks and those with a high tolerance for unrepentant snobbery.

All Things Considered: It’s crisp, it has an appropriately heraldic quality; that’s all fine or whatever, but to me, what those trumpets really say, and have said for the past twenty years, reaching back to childhood, is “time to cook dinner.” Likewise, the opening chord and theme of Morning Edition is too tied to the routine of my morning to mean much to me other than, “yeah, okay, morning.” Both themes are serviceable, inoffensive; they just do their jobs. I have trouble thinking of them as music. They’re more like the strokes of a clock.

Weekend Edition: Objectively, I have to say that this theme has no real problems. It sounds like a brisk morning walk—a power walk, perhaps. The air is clear, and you’re wearing white sneakers and jogging pants with elastic at the ankles. You are smiling, and you are whatever age you have to be to think Scott Simon and Liane Hansen are witty and emotionally effective. Perhaps because I find Scott Simon in particular to be cloying, insipid, and completely in love with himself, I find the Weekend Edition theme to be a bit the same. It’s a little too proud of its surprise harmonic progression; it’s a tad self-important. What I really hate—I mean reeeeeaally HATE—is when, in the middle of the program, they take the theme and slow it down to a funereal, quarter note-equals-forty-beats-to-the-minute Largo, an interpretation that in no way whatsoever serves the musical integrity of the melody. It is clearly meant to convey a misty and slightly contemplative mood—like you’ve finished your invigorating walk and are now settled in on the set of a Folgers coffee commercial—but it is just too goddamned slow. Once you are half-dead from this crime of tempo, Scott comes back on and finishes you off with one of his pretentious, overstuffed, morally dubious, badly organized personal essays. I don’t listen to him much these days, but I’m in the car for part of Saturday morning and my car radio is permanently tuned to NPR, so I always get a dose. It’s like an outdated sweet liqueur.

The Splendid Table: In spite of a slight cheese factor (heh), I kind of like this one. It’s expansive, yet intimate; mostly piano, a little oboe, a slight touch of atmospheric crap, but I can forgive that, because this theme is so perfectly suited to both this show and its host, Lynne Rosetto Kasper. She’s a sparkling personality who just casually happens to be an encyclopedic culinary genius—and if you think I’ve overstated the case, listen to her handle the call-in section. The hokey ascending modulations—and no one scorns ascending modulations like me—are like her bubbly, ubiquitous laugh: slightly irritating, but part of an overall package that is so heartening and generous that I let them slide. Ascending modulations? Ah well, chacun à son gout. More wine, please.

On the Media: I like this show, but it has one of the most ill-conceived musical themes in the NPR repertoire. Or maybe it’s supposed to be minimalism. Meaning that perhaps there is something very subtle and yet compelling going on that I am missing because I am unsophisticated. All I can hear is a banal, harmonically static, rhythmically dull outlining of a broken chord. It’s about as appealing as listening to someone use a hammer. They try to sex it up with jazz combo instrumentation, but this just makes it worse, sadder, more wannabe. This theme is begging to be taken as edgy. Desperation is so unattractive.

The Diane Rehm Show: I reserve my most vehement dislike for this one. Again, it’s not the show that bothers me; Diane Rehm is okay, though she’s not on my local stations, so these days I don’t listen to her. I don’t miss her show, but what I really don’t miss is its priggish little trumpet theme with a blah piano accompaniment. Someone completely dropped the ball here; it sounds like a college composition assignment. You’d probably get a decent score on it, but the professor might point out the lack of interesting harmonic progressions, the leaden interplay between the trumpet and piano. I can’t even be that generous, because for some reason this theme makes me think of Young Republicans. It sounds like uptight young men with rigid Christian views who wear starchy suits even when they don’t need to. The show really deserves better.

Speaking of Faith: Now here’s an example of a minimalist theme that actually works. The instrumentation is all percussion: the marimba maintains a pleasant, loping rhythm while the rest of the instruments build very, very gradual momentum while Krista Tippett, the host, explains what’s on for this week. In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I’m a huge fan of this show, so I’m probably predisposed to give them the benefit of the doubt. Not only is the theme good; the entire program has great musical editing. After the opening theme, they always segue effortlessly into another minimalist piece, Joseph Curiale’s “The Multiples of One,” which also works well in the context (background to Krista Tippett’s description of whomever her guest is). I like this piece mainly because the very beginning sounds exactly like the opening of “Battlestar Galactica,” which somehow is exactly the right association to start off a program on spirituality and religion. (Of course, SOF was around long before BSG, but let’s not split hairs.)

This American Life:

(Just kidding.)

And finally, you didn’t know this was a contest, but the winner is…

Hands down, it is the theme of Fresh Air. Everything about this theme works. It’s brash, but not smarmy. The ensemble is tight. Rhythmically, it’s alive and kicking, and the beginning even swings a bit, enough to make you lean into it. The melody and harmony are actually headed somewhere, and they make you care about their destination, which is a quality to be celebrated in an NPR theme; even some of the better ones have a tendency to get bogged down in directionless ambling. On Fresh Air, I’m actually sorry to hear the theme end and the show begin, because the music builds real excitement and is so genuinely good. You can hear the musicians enjoying themselves, and you feel like you are in on their party because you are smart and urbane enough to be listening to Fresh Air.

And what nobler goal could you ask for in public radio, than to make its viewers feel smart?

canada

I want to let any interested parties know that the Yarn Harlot has a fantastic, comprehensive post on exactly what the heck is going on with the Canadian government. Yes, it’s a knitting blog, but this post has nothing to do with knitting. She lives in Toronto, is famous for her witty knitting books (I personally own all of them), and has a lot of American readers. So she gives us a sort of Constitutional Democracy for Dummies lesson, then goes on to explain the current situation. Go read it, and then you can explain the whole thing to another American and make like you knew how the Canadian government worked all along. I will admit: all I knew was that they have a Parliament; they don’t directly elect their Prime Minister, just his party; they still have some weird connection to the Queen; and their current PM is pretty much a dick. This ignorance is pathetic, frankly. Not only are they our neighbors, but I have good friends who are Canadian and have periodically threatened to move there, as has pretty much every liberal I know over the past eight years. In a just world, we would be following their politics as closely as they do ours. (My cluelessness may stem from the fact that my boorish high school government teacher was the sort of person Jon Stewart was parodying when he referred to Canada recently as the “gay us.” But that’s no excuse.)

I'm writing a post on NPR theme songs, so NPR geeks, stay tuned.

pile o' crap

We were in Iowa for part of last week for Thanksgiving, hence the not posting. And while I have several post ideas, today probably won’t be the day for them. My list of things to do today is going hydra and sprouting fangs. (Out of curiosity, I just looked up “hydra” to see if my usage was anywhere close to appropriate, and found this: “a freshwater polyp with a cylindrical body at one end and a mouth surrounded by tentacles at the other.” My list of things to do is an independently-functioning tentacular polyp, threatening me with its gaping maw of destruction.

Sorry. I’ve been sleeping kind of funky lately.)

What’s new here, other than a great time in Iowa? A spider just dropped down from the ceiling to rest next to my hand. My elderly cat Djuna, who is a little crazy in the head at the best of times, is loping around the house with her knitted toy in her mouth, making low, mournful lowing noises. There are two litter boxes full of turds in the basement, no clean cat litter, and hardly any food (for cats or humans). I want to turn in my grad school application today for once and for all, but despite having all the elements in place I have a feeling that my protracted anality will force that into a day-long process, which means I am torn between a pressing desire to complete that and a pressing desire to do something about this filthy hovel in which we are attempting to live. I have a high tolerance for clutter when I am preoccupied with other things, but clutter makes the house feel oppressive, and December is a bad time for the house to feel oppressive.

How filthy is our house? It’s so filthy that the recycling no longer fits into its designated closet and we are piling our empty bottles on the counter. It’s so filthy that my GRE flashcards are still on the coffee table even though I took the test a month and a half ago, along with a printed article from The New Yorker, two permanent markers, the audiobook of The Audacity of Hope, a large cookbook, two library books, a copy of Journal of American Folklore, a plastic report cover, someone’s phone number, and an update disc for World of Warcraft. It’s so filthy there is a huge Igloo cooler sitting next to the couch and I have no idea why it is there. It’s so filthy that it’s easier for me to sit here describing the mess to you in minutest detail like the lamest stereotype of a blogger than to actually do something about it, even though I know I must, because I can’t bear to live in it any longer.

Maybe housekeeping would be easier for me if I worked to become one with mundane tasks and came to view cleaning as a spiritually cleansing activity. I love this in theory, but secretly feel that people who achieve perfect oneness while cleaning are smug and no better than they should be. Eric and I both clean because we reach the edges of our tolerance and become repulsed by ourselves. We only get through it by granting ourselves ample license to whine.

Which I'm doing right now, more's the pity for my readers. Sorry—meatier posts in the offing, I promise.