O Fair ::cough:: New Mexico

2008 is the last year of the Mint's "50 State Quarters" program, and we're finally getting around to New Mexico. According to the official page of the New Mexico Quarter:

The New Mexico Coin Commission, appointed by Governor Bill Richardson, solicited and reviewed approximately 1,000 concept submissions from state citizens . . . On April 24, 2007, Governor Richardson announced his recommendation of the "Zia Symbol over Topographical State Outline" design.

The Department of the Treasury approved the design on May 25, 2007. The other three designs considered were "Zia Symbol over Textured State Outline," "Textured Zia Symbol over State Outline," and "Zia Symbol over Textured State Outline," with the Zia symbol marking the location of the capital, Santa Fe.

We're so creative down there.

Incidentally, our state motto is also "Crescit Eundo", which literally means "It grows by going" and is generally rendered "It grows as it goes."

My new motto:

Sophomore year will never get me down!

Heavenly Reality

To celebrate my birthday (a couple days early), I went to lunch at West of Paris today with a few friends. I never cease to be astonished by the results of fine food, classic atmosphere and good company.

When you step in the front door, you forget that you are in the middle of nowhere, Idaho. The dirty slush on the concrete sidewalks outside become just a bad dream. Time stops.

Abby and I shared a cheese plate to start, which was incredible. Chef Foucachon came out and told us all about the cheeses, cut them for us, and told us in what order we should eat them. It went from a soft goat cheese through something I can't remember and a Gruyere to an amazingly creamy and tangy cheese with a layer of ash in the middle (not a typo: ash), and finished up with Boursin and Roquefort.* The only two I didn't care for very much were the first and the last. I've just never liked blue cheese. I freely confess that it is my fault, that I ought to develop a taste for it sometime in the future, but I still don't like it. The goat cheese, on the other hand, was very mild and creamy and not what I expected at all.

Then we split a chicken-curry crepe (I didn't have my camera to take pictures, so you'll have to use your imagination). I love curry, I love crepes, and so it was a perfect marriage of flavors. We each had a Turinois for desert -- a chestnut-Grand Marnier-hazelnut-chocolate mousse dessert with a sauce of crushed raspberries. Have I ever mentioned that my favorite fruit in the world is raspberry? It is.

The capstone of the whole meal, however, actually arrived right after we placed our order. I had no clue what kind of wine would be best with the cheese and crepe, but I knew that I had to get a glass of wine with my meal. It's not a celebration otherwise, and if one is at a French restaurant (which will certainly have the best wines) one must have wine. So I asked for a glass of whatever wine the Chef recommended, and he came out with a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau. Apparently they don't normally sell it by the glass, but he said that they would open it for us.

I remember reading some article about Beaujolais Nouveau last year, so I was quite excited to try it. It was delicious! I'm not a wine-expert, by any means, but I knew it was good. I can say that it was very light and almost crisp, but at the same time a very (how-do-you-say?) real wine. It didn't taste thin at all, which is what I usually dislike in chilled wines. Along with the cheese, it made my afternoon.

When we stepped back out into the Moscow afternoon air, it was like stepping off a cloud and plummeting back to earth. We had enjoyed a dose of un-reality (or heavenly reality, I wonder?), and had to go back to the business of everyday life. But it was fun while it lasted.

*I don't know if correct grammar allows for the capitalization of cheese names, but it should.

Thistlefield

Cloverfield. A movie whose entire "hype" premise was the dearth of information released, and it worked. A lot of people got really excited over what was, essentially, nothing. "Oh my gosh! It's amazing! I have no clue where it's gonna go . . . it could be, like, anything! What is it? I'm totally gonna analyze the trailer frame by frame to dig as much information out as possible!" So, if you are still excited about the movie, listen closely:

It was horrible.

There, have you changed your mind? Because I can't provide any arguments for you without ruining all the closely-kept secrets of J J Abrams and crew, and then you would hate me and the movie. So take my word, don't go, and read the following. But consider yourself warned about the spoilers.

************

Plot Synopsis: A group of friends is throwing a going-away party for their best friend who is leaving for Japan. He fights with his love interest at the party, she leaves, and while his friends are counseling him on the fire escape disaster strikes. When everyone in Manhattan is told to evacuate (something attacked from the sea), he gets a phone call from said love interest and decides to go back and rescue her. The friends, like all good friends, go with him and are slowly picked off by the rampaging monster until noone is left. The end. (Of course, we know all of this from the videotape his best friend was making at the party and kept running all night long).

Things I will grant before I criticize:

1. I watched it with a horrible audience.
There was a row of 13-year-old boys in front of us who had been chugging Red Bull all night long, two rows of high-school girls in front of them who started groaning and complaining loudly when the color bars showed at the beginning because they didn't realize that it was part of the movie, and an overly-critical and very audible couple behind us who kept making wisecracks about how well the camera was holding up.

2. It really did make me sick, which probably colored my impression of it.
I inherited my mother's stomach. I can read for hours in the car, ride any kind of ship or boat, and eat a funnel cake and pizza right before I go on the Tilt-A-Whirl. But the sheer visual mayhem was the sort of torture you would expect Sidney Bristow to endure in a remote Kazakh prison, not something for the modern movie-going public to see in a friendly neighborhood multi-plex. Just thinking about it gives me an eyeache and makes me queasy.

3. It was impressive.
There were a ton of special effects, and the 9-11 imagery was actually some of the best stuff in the whole movie. I know there was a lot of criticism of those shots in the weeks leading up to the release, but I felt like they successfully evoked the feelings that Manhattan was under attack, and that these were people who had seen something like this before. They lent verisimilitude, actually, especially because they generally imitated those real hand-held shots of the first plane crashing into the Twin Towers. And the lack of a soundtrack was really effective, because it cut out any clues as to what would happen next. It was much less corny than it could have been.

That said, I've got three main reasons for intensely disliking this movie.

First, internal consistency. "Hud," the best friend holding the camera, is a bad photographer; at the party, he can hardly keep all of someone's face in the shot for more than 3 seconds unless he is standing perfectly still. He doesn't even pay the attention to tracking that a normal person does when they hold a video camera. And all of that would be fine except for the times when he becomes a remarkably masterful cameraman, like in the stairwell. He is suddenly able to not only fade in and out with great timing while keeping the lens directly focused on the floor numbers, but he is also able to keep it from bouncing too wildly as he climbs. Huh.

Second, scariness. Or lack thereof. The scariest part was when they didn't know what the monster was, or even what was happening. As soon as they showed the whole monster, which was very very early on, it lost any element of suspense and became simply horrible. They didn't even save some aspects of it, like the little mini-monsters dropping off it, for later in the movie. On top of that, "Hud" kept making inane comments at the tensest moments, which completely deflated the fear. I can grant that this may be part of his character, and we all know folks who would crack a joke at a funeral, but it didn't help the movie to be any scarier.

Third, bad story writing. I never felt like I really could become attached to the characters -- especially "Beth," the girl he went back for. She seemed like a selfish, whiny person at the beginning, and you almost never saw her until close to the end, but she's the whole reason this pack of twenty-something civilians is wandering a war-zone Manhattan. We only see things from one perspective (interesting on a epistemological level, but not as a movie-goer). Even the hand-held camera isn't showing us "everything Hud sees" -- it shows us "everything Hud remembers to point the camera at, which usually excludes eyes, chins, or both." Even though one girl escapes, we never find out what happens to her. We don't know what happened afterward, except that the tape was found in "the area formerly known as Central Park." There's no resolution.

All in all, a waste of money. But if you still want to see it after this, you only have 3 options: die here, die in the tunnels, or die up top. Take your pick.

Culinary Vagaries (or, why you need a lid on the pot)

My lovely parents gave me "The Supper of the Lamb" by Robert Farrar Capon for Christmas this year, and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, I read it within 24 hours of opening the package, and the chapter on knives has a permanent place in my heart.

In fact, I loved it so much that I resolved to implement what I could from the book as soon as I returned to school. I got a chicken, pre-cooked as a concession to my busy schedule, and took all the meat off the bones. That done, I turned to the recipe for white stock, one of the basic things Father Capon says one must always have on hand. I carefully put a bay leaf, the chicken bones, some carrots and onion, and a little bit of salt and pepper in a quart of water. The pot went over the heat, with the lid on. But there I made a fatal error -- I did not smack the ill-fitting lid down tightly before I went out to the table to study my greek homework. And half an hour later, my roommate walked into the kitchen and asked "Was somebody cooking something?" The kitchen was filled with smoke, and my slowly blackening saucepan contained the charred bones of my stock. It was completely beyond rescue. Ah, well, such is the life of an elf.

Still, my enthusiasm for the book remains undiminished. Yes, Father Capon does marvelous things with an onion (oh, you will never again read "peel and chop an onion" without a brief moment of silence). He makes you long for stock, bread, lettuce, roasts, wine and butter. But the following are my favorite quotes.

I love the first because it is so anti-feminist. Part of the joy of reading Father Capon is his refusal to see managing a home as something women must settle for; femininity is glorious and exalted, a mystery of power in weakness and skill instead of force:

Properly edged and skillfully used, a cleaver will prepare whole meals without the assistance of another knife. But it does more. It bolsters your ego as a cook. Parting chickens with aplomb, you begin to believe you really might make it. And so does everyone else. A woman with cleaver in mid-swing is no mere woman. She breaks upon the eye of the beholder as an epiphany of power, as misterss of a house in which only trifles may be trifled with -- and in which she defines the trifles. A man who has seen women only as gentle arrangers of flowers has not seen all that women have to offer. Unsuspected majesties await him. . . .
You will also be provided with an instant rejoinder to anyone who presumes to lecture you on housewifery as an abject capitulation to the feminine mystique. Simply let him see you presiding over your kitchen with steel in one hand and butcher knife in the other. Execute six well-drawn strokes and his words will turn to ashes in his mouth. He was ready for a maladjusted prisoner of the pantry; you have showed him instead one of the priestly archetypes of the race. Mystique indeed! He has hardly scratched the surface.

On dieting:

A calorie is not a thing; it is a measurement. In itself, it does not exist. . . . Only things, you see, are capable of being eaten or burned, loved or loathed; no one ever yet got his teething into a calorie. . . . How sad then, to see real beings -- Harry and all his fellow calorie counters -- living their lives in abject terror of things that do not even go bump in the night. What a crime, not only against hospitality, but against being to hear him turn down homemade noodles in favor of idols and abstractions -- to watch himself prefer nothing to something. . . . Food does not exist merely for the sake of its nutritional value. To see it so is only to knuckle under still further to the desubstantialization of man, to regard not what things are, but what they mean to us -- to become, in short, solemn idolaters spiritualizing what should be loved as matter. A man's daily meal ought to be an exultation over the smack of desirability which lies at the roots of creation. To break real bread is to break the loveless hold of hell upon the world, and, by just that much, to set the secular free.

From the end of the book:

Why do we marry, why take friends and lovers, give our selves to music, painting, chemistry, or cooking? Out of simple delight in the resident goodness of creation, of course, but out of more that that, too. Half of earth's gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become. For all its rooted loveliness, the world has no continuing city here; it is an outlandish place, a foreign home, a session in via to a better version of itself--and it is our glory to see it so and thirst until Jerusalem comes home at last. We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.

Twitch, Twitch.

Here I sit, an awkward slice of bologna in the human sandwich of this Boeing 757. On my left, the middle aged business man with bushy eyebrows and a five o'clock shadow sleeps against the window, his hands folded in his lap. On my right is the Twitching Creature from Calcutta.

He must be asleep, I tell myself, because his eyes are closed. But he keeps lunging his shoulders into the aisle, contorting his head and shoulders before drooping limply forward. Then he starts jerking and bouncing his knees violently, shaking the whole row. I wonder what he'll do when we take off . . .

{Later}

The Twitching Calcuttan is slowly encroaching on my space, that sacred area between the armrests on the seat and the luggage-rack bars under the row in front of us. Elbow-wise and bouncing-knee-wise, he is taking over, and while my normal policy of elbow-room sharing dictates accomodation, I find myself tempted to administer a swift jab to the offending arm and then resist any attempts by this dozing moron to take any further space whatsoever. I want to "accidentally" poke him with my pen. Goodness! Am I losing all compassion?

[Editorial note: He revived when the beverage service came around, and remained moodily awake for the rest of the flight.]