Lusciousity

No, the title of this post does not mean that I am either crying in the bathtub (that would be a bit treacherous for my beloved Mac friend) or leading a sing along. It means that I have been listening to my weekly does of All Songs Considered, a podcast by NPR music critic Bob Boilen, and that this week’s featured artist was Emily Haines (also of Broken Social Scene) whose latest album is The Knives Don’t Have Your Back, and that was how she introduced one of her songs. The podcast has a brief interview with Ms. Haines and, best of all, several songs recorded from a live performance she recently gave in DC. I just discovered All Songs Considered this week, and I’m pumped. It looks like it has a pretty decent line up of featured bands and artists, and I’ve generally enjoyed Bob Boilen’s music reviews on Fresh Air. Best of all, it comes straight to me even though I don’t have an iPod, because you can subscribe to it via RSS feed and listen directly through your RSS reader. That means I don’t have to download anything or be at the computer with my iTunes on it. It’s web based, and it sounds good, and it might just give you an extra peek at some cool music.

My mouth is already watering reading this NYT write-up on Starbucks’s most recent attempt to bring it’s breakfast A-game to a store near you. As you may have noticed, their breakfast food is currently limited to pastries of variable qualities. I’ve had cinnamon scones that made me want to marry them and cinnamon scones that tasted like quick dry cement. This is in striking contrast to their coffee, which is uniformly what it is, and I like it what it is so I feel safe going into any store for my cuppa. Attempting to grab some of McDonald’s ginormous market share, they are engineering their own egg-cheese-and-bread combo and investing in gizmos to heat them up really fast and really hot so that they don’t have to have actual kitchens in their stores. Now, reheated food is generally not on my luscious list, but when Starbucks does reheating, you know it’s going to add what it refers to as the “thoughtful” twist. So, rather than a plain old bacon and eggs biscuit, they are offering, for instance a “chilled egg sandwich garnished with spinach and ricotta-herb spread for lunch. After the barista stuck it in the speed oven for 60 seconds, the English muffin was brown and crisp, the cheese had melted and the egg was steaming hot.” Seeing as I live in South Florida, I’m not holding my breath, but when I start smelling the warm goodness of eggy breakfast sandwiches, I’m going to first in line.

As promised, this Wednesday will be the first installment of a recurring series, Literary Lusciousity. Since I got the idea to make Wednesday lit day because it is also the day that I have poetry workshop this semester, it seems appropriate for me to include a little something we got in our first meeting, today. My professor put three quotations on our syllabus, and this one is from our luscious French friend, Paul Valery:

Ignorance is a treasure of infinite price that most [wo]men squander, when they should cherish its least fragments; some ruin it by educating themselves, others, unable so much as to conceive of making use of it, let it waste away. Quite on the contrary, we should search for it assiduously in what we think we know best. Leaf through a dictionary or try to make one, and you will find that every word covers and masks a well so bottomless that the questions you toss into it arouse no more than an echo. –from Man and the Sea Shell

This got me thinking about that article that has been at the top of the NYT most-emailed this week called Happiness 101. I read part of it, and one thing that sticks with me is how when they gave students the assignment to be mindful of the world around them for five minutes a day, they all wandered back into the classroom awestruck and high on life and said things like “I never knew there were so many different kinds of trees on the way to campus.” So many of the hours of my day are spent trying to know more, I’ll admit that I pretty much forget that sometimes it pays to approach the world as if I knew nothing about it, because really, I don’t. Like anything alive and luscious, words and the world and the people we know are constantly under transformation.  We struggle to navigate their fluidity by trying to establish constants, but there is so much joy and discovery in letting everything befuddle us again. On that note, I think I am going to take a walk and be ignorant for a while.

…and that’s why, on my latest trip to the public library (not the stuffy academic one I work at), actually my first library trip of the new year, I couldn’t resist picking up this slim volume. On the one hand, the “you can change your life by thinking less, doing more, and getting started right now” philosophy that this book espouses is bit repellant in and of itself, but on the other hand, it is entirely possible that one small hint could get you out of a rut you might have wandered into. So I’m not reading this book cover to cover, I’m just leaving it around the apartment and reading a couple of pages every now and again. This is guaranteed to last only as long as my new year’s resolutions, so not long, but here’s what it has offered me most recently: understanding is the booby prize. In short, what author MJ Ryan tells us is that it is far less important to understand why you do what you do than to be able to change what you are doing if it makes you unhappy. This is advice that I would generally qualify substantially (hey, understanding is the whole god@#$% raison de etre of us English, not to mention that I am a believer in the talking cure for a variety of ills), but I put it to good use tonight. While making dinner with D, I found myself relegated to the task peeling, coring, and slicing of one green apple. The peeling went fine, but when I got to the coring part I realized that I was 1) completely inept with a paring knife and 2) extremely scared of chopping my thumb in half as I attempted to pull the knife towards me in an effort to remove the core part of my quartered, peeled apple. I had a choice. I could give up and make D do it, which he usually does all on his own as soon as he sees a blade come too near one of my fingers, or I could just take it slow and get it done somehow and not let myself get stalled in my usual muck of questions when something slightly frustrating comes into my life. I.e., Why am I the kind of person who can’t core an apple? Why can’t I cook? What am I doing wrong and does God hate me? In this instance, I chose to believe that understanding was the booby prize and soldiered on until I had only the edible parts of the apple ready to chop before me. I may never know just why coring apples isn’t my strong suit, but tonight I cored an apple and did my bit to get that Chicken with Apple and Mushroom Sauce and Steam Asparagus on the table, proving that at least once in a while, the less examined life is actually more worth living.

Here concludes this Monday’s Lusciousity cheerleading pep talk. Go forth and understand no more!

My Global Voices RSS feed brought me some luscious riches this morning: a link to Peruvian gourmand Alejandro’s blog called Peru Food and in particular this post about Amazonian street food, mostly fruit-based concoctions, complete with photos. Although I’ve never tasted camu camu or aguaje, looking at these pictures made me want to, and it took me right back to my days in Brazil, where all sorts of fruit were cheap and plentiful and mixed up in ways I had never dreamed of before. For the final month of our stay there, D and I pretty much lived on açai smoothies, in part because we knew we wouldn’t be finding any once we got back to the States. That turns out to be only partially true, as açai looks poised to come into healthy vogue any day now, but I have yet to find a place that mixes up açai na tigela on demand. Probably the best thing to do is just go back and be even more adventurous with my fruit choices. Still, when you can’t fly to South America on a whim, cruising Peru Food has to be one of the next best things.

I’m kicking around the idea of having a loose posting schedule for Lusciousity, so that readers could have at least some idea of what they are going to see when they tune in. Not that I want to cast aside serendipity and spur of the moment lusciousness, but maybe something like this:

Monday: Luscious Cheerleading–a little something uplifting to get the week going

Tuesday: In Search of Lost Luscious–your basic nostalgifying

Wednesday: Literary Luscious–this coincides with the day of my poetry workshop this semester, so there should be plenty of material

Thursday: Food & Drink–enough said

Friday: Film and Other Luscious Forms of Culture–b/c you might need something to do over the weekend

Saturday & Sunday: Lusciousity goes on hiatus except in cases of extreme inspiration

We shall see. I am sure this basic frame could use some tweaking, but for now I kind of like the idea of having a little focus to bring to this blog post form when I sit down to fill it up.  I can already think of a couple of things that got left out, Unluscious Item of the Week, for example, so I might need to build in a wildcard day. In any case, let the experiment begin!

Hello Luscious Ones! After a long and regenerative silence, Lusciousity is back and ready to take on the new year with our usual collection of aspirations, inspirations, and other half-thought out glimmers of immortality through luscious living.

Now, on to that prickly new year’s topic of resolutions. Resolutions, for or against? As usual, Lusciousity likes to have it both ways. Yes, we want to aim high and higher. We want to be the change we want to see in the world. We want to spend our treasures of time and health and money more wisely and give more freely and learn something new before we’ve even opened our box of bran flakes every morning. These can help make life more luscious. And yet… most new year’s resolutions involve the word “better,” and the word “better” kind of goes against Lusciousity’s philosophical stance that the world is probably already good if we make the effort to notice it (not so much the case if you are a resident of certain war-ravaged countries, but you get my general meaning). So while resolutions at their best foster hope in the potential for a more fully self-actualized life, they can also foster dissatisfaction with the riches that our lives already offer us. My conclusion is, make them but only take them as seriously as makes you feel good.

In that spirit, I’ll start the year off by sharing one of my perennial resolutions: To Have Better Taste in Just About Everything. Fortunately, two of my good tasting… oh wait, that doesn’t sound right… sophisticated friends have sent D and me music mixes to get our year started out on some good notes. Thanks LCB and Editor Steven! And, due to the generosity of Diego and Frida, we can now listen to this good music on our speakers wirelessly, so that will give us no excuse not to fill our apartment with tunes. So on the music side of good taste, I have great guidance to start me off. Now onto fashion… well, I am pretty much a hopeless case in this area, but I do try to fake a theoretical knowledge of it through reading articles such as this NYT commentary on the decentered world of contemporary fashion. Money quote: “Has it ever appeared more inevitable that the cult of the designer is slated for the cultural slag heap, there to join all those other monuments to the outmoded notion of the grand career (retrospective albums, DVD collections, the Great Novel)?” (Wow! Gotta blog about that over on LS asap.) But now on to the food side, where typically have the good sense to say no to my budget and yes to my stomach. For example, D and I spent the very first hours of the new year (yes, I do mean 1am to 5am) cooking pecan sticky buns (recipe courtesy of Ruth Reichl’s Gourmet Cookbook) and it was well worth the hours of watching dough rise just to taste the buttery flaky sweet goodness of fresh rolls and have something truly yummy to offer our guest with an early morning flight out. There’s still a week of homework-free life left before spring semester kicks in, and in it I resolve to cook from scratch at least one meal (even if it is just a Rachel Ray meal… that Good Fennels Pasta last week was really tasty and lasted us eight servings–bonus).

Now I’ve got my own marching orders, better start following them. Onward to lunch!

Oh my! It’s been two weeks since my last substantial posting and still flying by is the season of Christmas. Okay, in the interest of your valuable time, here in list form, is what I have and have not been doing to lusciously celebrate.

Have Not:

1) Put up my Christmas tree.

2) Baked a single cookie from scratch. (Though this will change soon!)

3) Listened to or sung The Messiah.

4) Lit an advent candle.

5) Put a dollar bill in a Salvation Army bellringer’s jar (where are they all? I haven’t seen one yet).

6) Sung a carol. So sad! “Wassail, wassail all over the town!” Okay, that’s better.

7) Frozen my ass off at some parade involving marching bands. Some traditions are better dead.

Have:

1) Set my Firefox theme to Tinseltown. Thought this was so much fun that I have also downloaded Firefox onto all of my work computers just so I could set them to Tinseltown.

2) Downloaded the aforementioned Sufjan holiday song and also Aimee Mann’s cover of I’ll Be Home for Christmas available on Salon’s Audiofile.

3) Baked some non-from scratch cookies.

4) Eaten several holiday cookies of from scratch and non-from scratch varieties.

5) Traveled home to Michigan to see my family, give them gifts, get gifts from them, and eat cookies at the annual holiday party.

6) Ordered the Peppermint Hot Chocolate at Starbucks several times. It’s a yummy, caffeine free alternative to the mocha.

7) DVR’d the Chrismakkah episode of The OC… although I haven’t watched it yet.

Mailed Christmas cards with a cute tropical theme that will almost assuredly not arrive in time for Christmas.

9) Wrapped several gifts.

10) Found a good recording of “Jesus Christ, The Apple Tree” on the Classical Music Library online. Haven’t found it free online, but here are the lyrics.

11) Agonized over what to get my boss.

12) Bought a bottle of Beujolais Village. Oh wait, I don’t need Christmas as an excuse to do that. But this bottle I bought with a Christmas frame of mind.

Okay, that’s the round-up. More later I hope.

I may indeed be the last person on the planet to know about this, since I am pretty lazy about the weekly free iTunes downloads, but I was just over getting my free copy of John Hodgman’s (you know, the PC from the Mac vs. PC commercials) Areas of My Expertise as an audio book when I saw that this week’s is a holiday tune by Mr. Stevens called “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!”. It’s a bit heavy on the God, but v. Suf and easygoing in a depressive Michigan winter kind of way. So get it now for free if you like.

Start your Tivo’s and make yourself some boozy hot chocolate, tonight is the Victoria Secret Fashion Show. 10pm, CBS. Gisele for the boys, Justin Timberlake for the girls, or vice versa if you swing that way, and let us not forget the stunning lighting effects for the stage designers among us. This is one hour of television that has been a tradition for us Editors, ever since Christmas 2003 found us gathered in Steven and WA’s apartment, crowding into the futon and remarking on the jaw-dropping, um, runway surfacing. Consider this a luscious alert to your chance to join in.