that was probably awkward

The War Blog on Terror

It's not that I'm being lazy and can't be bothered to post something with actual paragraphs and insightful critical analysis of Our World, but I think this trumps just about anything I could possibly give PA readers today:  The TSA -- yep, the Transportation Security Administration, the folks responsible for the surreal security screening measures at stateside airports -- has a blog.  No, seriously: it's called Evolution of Security, and the tagline is -- are you ready? -- Terrorists Evolve.  Threats Evolve.  Security Must Stay Ahead.  You Play A Part. 

Ahem.  Go forth and see for yourselves.  Back to real paragraphs and slightly-less-fearful ruminations tomorrow. 

Questionable: Cheeseburger in a Can

Need I say more? 

[Link via Gizmodo, who does say a wee bit more.]

Update for the gastronomically curious: PA contributor/reader (and German speaker) KS checked out the product's German website, and reports back with the following information:

"I did some research into the cheeseburger in a can thing.  It's clear from the website you can buy it from that this is backpacking/camping food (the name of the company itself is directly translated as "hiking dinnertime" after all).  They don't have anything on the site to indicate what it is exactly, but I found a German blog that reviewed the product and as far as i can tell, it's hamburger and cheese with bread in a can.   

Looking back onto the site you can buy it from, it would appear that this company has developed a way of preserving food that seems some how similar to freeze-drying and lends itself very well to preserving food for hiking, etc.  So, i assume that they treat the meat of the burger (and the cheese too? unclear if the cheese is mixed in the meat or not), add the bread, and enclose it in a can. From the review blog i gather that, when you want to eat it while hiking, you boil a pot of water, place the entire can in the water for a certain amount of time to heat up the product.  the can has an opening on either side, which you can open and slide the burger out. viola: cheeseburger in a can. 

Nothing was said about the lettuce and tomato, etc.  Perhaps they are in there too?  Unclear.  The verdict from the review however, was that the burger tasted amazing.

Oh, and it can sit on a shelf for 12 months before going bad.  YUM."

Second update: Someone's done the dirty work for us.  Photos and taste description here.  Oh my word. 

Just Another Maoist Monday

A few weeks ago, there was this strange confluence whereby it seemed like everyone around me was having a Simon and Garfunkel renaissance: MK and his friends spent one drunken evening in Brooklyn elaborating on Paul Simon's myriad talents as a songwriter, while that same day JB and I couldn't stop waxing poetic about S&G's song America, which crescendoes to the very-funny-to-me, very-poignant-to-JB line, "...Counting the cars on the New Jersey turnpike / They've all come to look fooooorrrrrr Aaaa-merrrrr-ica!"   The following day at work MK and I started our own conversation about the song, giggling about "I said be careful, his bowtie is really a camera..."   In other words: S&G, they're good times -- nothing particularly hip or cool about them (and that's a good thing), and really just nice to listen to.   And heck, they bring people together!

Leave it to the Maoist International to educate us otherwise.

My joy knows no bounds

Babies kicked out of Brooklyn bar.

It's a shame I wasn't there to see it.

Housekeeping: Serif-Free Living

Hey, so yes: we've gone sans serif.  We think it looks pretty nice, though we'd like to apologize to anyone checking us out via Internet Explorer and wondering what the big deal is -- there's a good chance that IE is making us look incredibly garish and ugly, and we're not sure why.  Things should be fine on Firefox and Safari. 

This is all to say that y'all should be on Firefox anyway -- it's just a much better interface, despite its occasional kinks.  And we're much prettier on it!  Download it here.

I Rant Because I Care: Just Stop Already, Sunday Styles

I've ranted before about the strange hipster/scenester fkfest that is the NY Times' Sunday column 'A Night Out With,' in the paper's Fashion and Style section.  In these columns is usually profiled some person/band/phenomenon that is on the cusp of greatness -- and by greatness I really think it's one-hit-wonderness, but don't tell that to the breathlessly gushing Times reporters who spend an evening carousing with the person/band/phenomenon in question, and then offer up descriptions of how funny/quirky/smirky/smart these people are, and how cool it is that they've chosen to spend their Night Out at some effortlessly cool bar in Bushwick or a hole-in-the-wall Indian place that nobody knows about (shh!  don't tell!), and how droll and quippy their conversations are. 

Last week it was the young-ish cast of the new JJ Abrams-produced Cloverfield.  This week is a band called Vampire Weekend, four Columbia University alums whose first album is coming out next week (they've already won over all the music blogs, apparently), and who have decided to spend their Night Out at their old college-era haunts in Morningside Heights.  Oooh!  Fun!  Let's hang out with the band where they used to eat ... when they were sophomores!  How absolutely charming!  The article is here, but let me just give you the highlights:

“I think they invented the lime rickey here,” said the band’s keyboardist, Rostam Batmanglij, who interned for the Oxford English Dictionary during college. He took a sip of the retro soft drink and noted its cherry undertones.
[...]
Describing its sound as “Upper West Side Soweto,” the quartet combines library smarts with Afro-inflected pop; the lyrics name-drop reggaetón, Benetton and the Indian town of Dharmsala, and question the merits of certain punctuation marks in the band’s single “Oxford Comma.”
[...]
“Did you know the guitarist’s first girlfriend was Liza Minelli?” he asked, in a reference to the band [Love's] Bryan MacLean. His smirk betrayed his delight in wielding this nugget.

His bandmates were no slouches in the did-you-know department.

“Did you know that Henry Rollins was once the manager of an Häagen-Dazs store?” said Christopher Tomson, the band’s lanky drummer.

Mr. Koenig: “Did you know that New Jersey is the capital of the flavor industry?”

“Did you know the flavor of strawberry yogurt comes from crushed bugs?” Mr. Baio piped back up.

The guys are just as studied when it comes to fashion, with a preference for blazers, button-downs and other blue-blood affectations.

Sigh.  Somewhere in the middle of the article is the following reporterly quip: "Such intellectual showmanship shouldn’t be surprising to anyone familiar with Vampire Weekend — and is anyone not these days?"  And I guess that's the thing: look, I can't really comment on the band's qualities qua band-ness, you know, as folks who produce these UWS Soweto sounds, and maybe Vampire Weekend is, in fact, amazing and wonderful and deserving of all of these pre-release accolades.  But -- BUT -- you're not going to get me to actually listen to the music by saying shit like "anyone familiar with VW -- and is anyone not these days?"  Are you trying to get me to despise them before the fact?  Also, these sorts of profiles where I'm supposed to ooh and ahh over their intellectual credentials -- OH  MY GOD THEY WENT TO COLLEGE -- christ, Get Off It Already.  'Library smarts'?  Jesus.  And don't get me started on their 'studied' fashion sense.  I can't tell anymore which I'm more annoyed at: the band or the writing.  And that's the thing with the column -- the writing style pretty much ensures that you end up cursing everyone involved.  The self-satisfied smugness of it all just makes me die a little bit on the inside.   

At least in the time it took me to write this piece, we -- the collective intellectual showmanly duo of Probably Awkward -- got our library smarts together and figured out how to de-serif our fonts. 

Guest Questionable: Sonic's FRITOS® Chili Cheese Wrap

We here at PA are under a deluge of work this week -- MD is in the midst of running a rolling QA and UAT in the DEV AND REF environments because of lost resource hours due to unplanned PTO and dealing with cross domain issues, and HT has been spending her time trying to understand what MD does, in addition to burying her head in MS Access manuals.  (Yeah, see?  Not fun.  We hope you all are quickly disabusing yourselves of the idea that we lead glamorous lives and eat leisurely breakfasts at Balthazar.  Which, mind you, we would gladly do in a heartbeat.)  In our absence, the inimitable NM has agreed to regale you, dear readers, with her story of gastronomic hope and woe.  A former east coaster turned San Franciscan, NM is the proverbial glue that holds this blog together -- a longstanding friend of PA who has seen us through various schools (professional/thinking/otherwise), and whose couch has, on and off, been one of our homes.  We do not lie when we state that NM know more about design, and knows a heck of a lot more words, than you do; what's more, she actually knows how to design, and how to use those words.  If ever you try to break into her house, she'll probably thwack you over the head with one of her volumes of the OED.  If you ask nicely to enter her house, perhaps bearing food and a Rohmer film, she might pour you a nice tall glass of pink champagne.  Also, her mom's an expert skeet shooter, so don't go messing with her.   Without further ado...

Hello America (& Singapore & G*d & the rest of you sitemeter.com-tracked PA enthusiasts).  Several weeks ago I was en route to Savannah / Hilton Head International Airport ("International" because I think you can get a flight to Cancun), wrapping up a week-long holiday stay in nearby Statesboro, Georgia, county seat of Bulloch County and home to the Mr. and Mrs. M, my ever-lovin' parents. Delta being Delta and winter weather being winter weather, we discovered that my flight westward had been delayed, and decided to do two of the things any self-respecting Southerner would do if given a spare hour:  Wal-Mart and Sonic.

Our trip to Wal-Mart for 75% off Christmas wrapping ribbon I won't narrate, but lunch at Sonic yielded a taste sensation that the limits of regional fast food chains will regrettably keep from sweeping the nation -- and at any rate I don't think there are Sonics in Singapore or Heaven ( Philly cream cheese, yes.  Sonics, no.).  Ever since our days at The Levee of Williamsburg, HT and I have had a deal whereby we order frito pie:  if offered, where offered, and with pulled pork if possible.  This has lead me to some gastronomic epiphanies, so although Sonic means burgers, when I peered over Mr. M's shoulder at the drive-in menu and saw on the marquee: "FRITOS® Chili Cheese Wrap," I knew what I had to do. 

Mr. M being a good sport and himself FRITOS® inclined, he kindly placed the order.  We drove the few minutes to the airport and took the food into the vaulted faux-skylit atrium of SAV, choosing a spacious suite of garden furniture at which to enjoy our repast. Unfortunately, it wasn't until I had taken my first bite that I remembered I had in my bag a better camera than the one in my cell, so I don't have a good photograph of the virgin FRITOS® Chili Cheese Wrap.  Which is too bad, because the second most striking thing about this product was how small it was.  Not even 6 inches "tall," and not quite 3 inches wide.  What kind of America is this?

The most striking thing about the FRITOS® Chili Cheese Wrap is that it lives up to its receipt billing -- FRITOWR -- much more so than it does its as-advertised name.  By which I mean:  it is FRITOS® and it is WRap.  There is not much in between.  According to the Sonic website, I should have been given the option of lettuce and tomatoes with my FRITOS® Chili Cheese Wrap.  As I was expecting hand-portable frito pie, I would have declined both -- frito pie with lettuce?  tomatoes? -- but for the record I was not given these options. 

One of the best things about frito pie is that if the proportions are just right, the humidity of the chili and the melting cheese gets the fritos just the other side of crunchy.  If it were pasta you'd say al dente and no one would look at you funny.  Since it's fritos, let's just say that ideally, the fritos get softer but not soggy, and have just enough corn-powered bite left in them to balance out the gooey chilicheesyness of the "pie" part of the picture.   

Unfortunately, when your FRITOS® Chili Cheese Wrap is 75% FRITOS®, 15% Wrap, and only 10% Chili + Cheese, the same alchemy doesn't happen.  What you get instead, and what I experienced, is like...I don't know...wrapping (i) a vending machine sized bag of FRITOS®, (ii) a dozen individual shreds of shredded cheese, and (iii) a spoonful of something found at the bottom of a post-lunch can of Campbell's Chunky (not that I know, and not that you know, but you and I -- we watch tv) in a tortilla and shoving it in the microwave for the time it takes you to run to the loo.  By the time you're washing your hands, you have a homemade FRITOS® Chili Cheese Wrap indistinguishable from the Sonic version, but you've died a little inside.  And I'm not talking gastrointestinally -- 10% Chili Cheese is well outside of the GI danger zone, but I'm not saying that's such a good thing.

What I am saying is:  This ain't a frito pie burrito, and don't let no one tell you no different.

[ First image swiped from photogo's flickr page.]

Guest Aficionado: Old Lines Who'd Have Thought He Would Ever Reuse: The Magnetic Fields' Distortion

Up to bat at Team PA: our dear friend MRP, whom we have known for upwards of -- goodness! -- 16 years now, and who is by far the funniest and most talented Dewars-swilling, casino-haunting, avant-theatre-participating music enthusiast to ever come out of the Bucks County PA / West-Central NJ region.   (Seriously, there was a time when I (HT) would see MRP only at weddings and casinos, which now leads me to ponder the viability of a Four Weddings|Oceans 11 cinematic mashup, which -- well, let's forget I said anything.)  When I asked him how I should describe his day job, MRP suggested I put down: "A Not Traditionally Glamorous Position with a Relatively Glamorous Media Conglomerate," which I don't think can be beat for its simultaneity of clarity and obfuscation.   MRP lives in NYC with a lass and their dog, and on an irregular basis will be reviewing music you'd probably like if you went to high school between 1986 and, say, 1996, aka An Irregularly Appearing Review of Pseudo-Indie but Probably More Semi-Mainstream Albums.   Without further ado...

I was raised largely on folk and jazz: those are both all about quotations; if you're listening to bebop and you don't hear the quotations, you don't get the music, you don't understand it…I don't necessarily want everyone to get all of the references and exhaust the meaning of the song – that would be, that would be horrible.

-Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields, interviewed as part of the NPR series "Creators at Carnegie," November 2005.

As a fan of The Magnetic Fields, I am constantly at war with myself. If you were to ask me what I thought constituted "good" music, I would probably rattle off a too-clever-by-half list of vagaries: raw vulnerability, innovative instrumentation, and avant-garde originality. On their face, sure, these things could surely constitute the criteria for "good" songwriting. (Yes, they also come close to smacking of a certain type of "indie" elitism.) However, if you were then to ask me what I liked about The Magnetic Fields, I'd look at you sheepishly and then cop to loving his geeky wordplay, his dry delivery, his sappiness in spite of his dryness, his gender-bending narrators, his almost pathological focus on love, his backward-looking referentiality, his inward-looking self-referentiality, and his humor (I would probably mumble when mentioning this last one: laughter is far from cool).

In my original draft of this review, the word count had reached 750 before I had even started discussing Distortion. I was attempting to address Merritt's ceaseless referencing, both to the history of popular music and, to an increasing extent, his own work. I thought this sort of approach would befit the review's appearance on PA. But then, well, I sort of wrote myself into a corner. (Whether that approach basically starts out in the corner is another matter…) So I got over myself and started over.

How, then, does Distortion stack up? Merritt's wordplay is there in all its finest, as is his taste for internal rhymes, impeccable arrangements, and memorable melodies. In addition, the breadth of the music's references continues to impress: "Too Drunk to Dream" sounds like an homage to a Buddy Holly-era break-up tune, no matter how abject the lyrics turn; "California Girls" is a scathing, violent, and hysterical inversion of the Beach Boys' original sentiment, and so on.

Another strategy would have been to identify each song's antecedents on prior TMF albums; with Distortion, I think Merritt has turned more inward than before. Underneath each song, I heard shades and allusions and snippets of earlier TMF tunes. Was that a bit of "Fear of Trains" in the piano run in the background of "Drive on, Driver?" Was "Xavier Says" on Distant Plastic Trees? If not, was "Please Stop Dancing" on Get Lost? Is "Mr. Mistletoe" an even-more-bitter cousin to Hyacinth & Thistle's "I've Got New York?"

What to make of all this footnoting? Does it, in the end, matter? At the end of the day, what if "Old Fools" sounds sort of like something that I'm pretty sure was on Volume 3 of 69 Love Songs? No, it does not, because the doleful observer of "Old Fools" almost makes me cry every time. And the same goes for "I'll Dream Alone," in all its melodramatic beauty. That song makes me want to get a barstool and a mic and start telling you about a girl I knew in college, which is why it's my favorite on the album. And what about the goofy-at-first-glance "The Nun's Litany?" Well, it's been a while since a song made me laugh and then want to look back on life and wonder about what could have been. And "Courtesans" – rarely has a song so successfully taken a gimlet-eyed look at an entire vocation while pulling on your heartstrings so consistently.

Also, does it matter that I've avoided the whole distortion thing on Distortion? Well, I'd argue that the distortion is sort of beside the point; it is what it is. In its weird way it's both entirely integral to the album, and yet, unnecessary, and this may be where Merritt trips himself up: his clinicism. I remember Merritt once discussing the equivalence of sounds generated by different sources; that is – permit me to butcher his point here – an electrical guitar shouldn't, on some level, be considered any differently than an acoustic guitar or a synth. All three generate waves, after all. From this point of view, experimenting with sounds becomes just that: an experiment. And so, the loud songs aren't really that loud – they're "loud." It's to Merritt's credit that he taps such a deep well of real feeling, in spite of each song being held at arm's length. Of course, it's that the songs are at war with themselves that makes me love it in the first place. It's why it's a Magnetic Fields record in the first place, and a great one at that.

Photographs and Mourning

Two months before I left New York, I was visited by what I took to calling the 10 Plagues of Graham Avenue: In my brief time in AH's apartment a new curse seemed to visit us every few days: The Bursting Lights. The Falling Shelves. The Rash. The Fire. The Mosquitos. The Mother-in-Law. The Spurned Lover in the Dark. As the culmination of these plagues, I noticed one of backup hard drives, the home to my writing and photography from late 2006-present wouldn't turn on. I began researching how to repair it on my laptop when my computer's drive spun up and then crashed down. The screen went white. My laptop was dead. The next day the electrical outlet was shooting out sparks and I had lost 2007.

As a former IT professional, I assumed I could fix whatever minor problem I had. Booting from a dvd failed. Booting from a hard drive failed. Attempting to access my files from another laptop failed. My computer was dead.

A trip to the Apple store confirmed my diagnosis. A data recovery provider like Tekserve might be able to fix it, but it would be expensive. I took my laptop back from them and called Tekserve. When I discovered what they charged, I decided to embrace fate and let my data go and brought the laptop back to the store for repair. Two days later, almost in tears, I called Apple to ask if they had begun work because I had decided I was willing to pay to get my photos back. I then took the laptop to a cheaper vendor (Mikey's Hookup) and told them to fix it, expenses be damned. A week later, I learned it was unrecoverable: The old drive was completely dead.

The external drive still held out hope. I broke through its casing and disassembled it in the chances the outside shell was broken and not the data containing magnetic platters inside. I waited weeks before I bought a replacement drive bay out of fear of what I would find. I plugged it in and heard click, click, click. Click, click, click. There was nothing there. Everything was lost.

In On Photography Susan Sontag talks about photography as an act of violence and possession, a "a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time."  I first attempted to read On Photography in the darkroom of my college while first learning the art  of developing pictures. At the time, I found it  to be a reactionary and angry text and kept "accidentally" leaving it behind before I finally lost it for good . To me, photography was a way to embrace life, to preserve and treasure each moment, and capture what might otherwise be lost. To take a picture was to endow every second with immortality and sustain what would otherwise pass.

But now, with the loss of a year of images, I can see the ways in which photography is allied with death.

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's ) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. (Sontag)

I find myself grieving not just the loss of the physical(digital) image but also the loss of the crystallized moments they represent. I am not a participant in this world: I am an observer. In some real way each image represents minutes of my life. I take notes in images which serve as guideposts to bring me back to trains of thoughts or fun I should have been having. Without them, am I a year younger?

Or am I much much older now that so much time has been wasted?

I have thought about a project where I attempt to recreate each image I have lost, but the pictures above and all my favorite images are found objects or stolen moments in places that no longer exist except as tiny lo-res jpegs on a Flickr or a Picasa. I had spent the year documenting my love affair with the changing Red Hook waterfront. It is now gone. The beautiful decaying Revere Sugar Factory was torn down while I was away. Soon an IKEA will be built beside the lot and it will house another big box store.

By taking these pictures of decaying objects, ruins, and ephemeral monumentality, I have tried to fight time and preserve that miraculous second when something is not one thing or another but in the process of being both. I try to tell myself that to lose these photos to the entropic processes acting on the overtaxed electrical system of an old tenement building, a building in a neighborhood slowly being transformed from ghetto to gentrified shell, is perhaps the most fitting testament they could have received.

But, in truth, I will always miss the Sugar Factory.

 

The Quirk: [.........]

OK, before you all send me links to this Pitchfork article about this upcoming short film based on a Miranda July short story and starring Lavender Diamond's Becky Stark, let me just stop you and inform you of the following:

1. I already know about it.
2. The film is directed by the sister of PA contributor and friend RZS, so I'm feeling a bit more measured with regard to my feelings about the project. Also, RZS, who served as the film's producer, tells me that they "de-quirkified" the story on which the film is based.
3. I'm still unable to undo the Web of Twee that has suddenly taken over my life.

So: Everybody carry on.  I'm going to wait till I see the film before I pass judgment on this one.  I know, I know, it's *so* not like me.   I'm hoping that things will change around the Lunar New Year.   Otherwise this blog's going under.

[Photo swiped from Pitchfork.]