“Could” include: jelly, cream of almonds, pheasant, partridges, quails, cocks, gulls, kid, lamb or pigeon, larks or rabbits, chickens, venison in paste, tarts, fritters, fruit, butter and eggs.
Henry VIII’s Second Course
May 12, 2016What Fresh Hell
May 11, 2016Yesterday, many news outlets over here featured a story like this, about a simulated terror attack at a big shopping center in Manchester. Here’s the gist: the Home Office and the Manchester Police arranged for a fake suicide bomber to attack the shopping mall, “injuring” fake victims in the process. (They got called out on Twitter for having the bomber scream, “Allahu Akbar!”) It’s during moments like these that I begin to believe we’re truly living in a postmodern dystopia, a la White Noise.
“That’s quite an armband you’ve got there. What does SIMUVAC mean? Sounds important.”
“Short for simulated evacuation. Anew state program they’re still battling over funds for.”
“But this evacuation isn’t simulated. It’s real.”
“We know that. But we thought we could use it as a model.”
“A form of practice? Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?”
“We took it right into the streets.”
“How is it going?” I said.
“The insection curve isn’t as smooth as we would like. There’s a probability excess. Plus which we don’t have our victims laid out where we’d want them if this was an actual simulation. In other words we’re forced to take our victims as we find them. We didn’t get a jump on computer traffic. Suddenly it just spilled out, three-dimensionally, all over the landscape. You have to make allowances for the fact that everything we see tonight is real. There’s a lot of polishing we still have to do. But that’s what this exercise is all about.”
“What about the computers? Is that real data you’re running through the system or is it just practice stuff?”
“You watch,” he said.
He spent a fair amount of time tapping on the keys and then studying coded responses on the data screen––a considerably longer time, it seemed to me, than he’d devoted to the people who preceded me in line. In fact I began to feel that others were watching me. I stood with my arms folded, trying to create a picture of an impassive man, someone in line at a hardware store waiting for the girl at the register to ring up his heavy-duty rope. It seemed the only way to neutralize events, to counteract that passage of computerized dots that registered my life and death. Look at no one, reveal nothing, remain still. The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.
“You’re generating big numbers,” he said, peering at the screen.
***
I would love to do a long form piece all about these simulated terror attacks. I’m particularly interested in how they cast them.
Embarrassing
May 5, 2016My husband pointed out to me that probably what I was thinking of (re: two posts down) was the song “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones. Um, yeah. That was it. Very hard to remember. But also he suggested it was reminiscent of a shitty late nineties horror flick called Fallen, starring Denzel Washington and John Goodman. Let’s say it was that.
Concept Tumblr
May 4, 2016Last week, when my husband and I were in Rome, I saw a nun driving a car across the Isola Tiberina, and then she honked at someone! I was tickled. My husband said, “Nuns doing stuff is the best.” And lo, a concept Tumblr was born! I won’t start it because I would inevitably run out of steam, and you know how much it pains me to see abandoned blogs, but here is a blueprint of what it might look like:
Playing croquet…
Baking bread…
Voting…
Playing in the ocean…
Chilling at the bar…
Smoking herb…
Rollerskating…
Eating cake…
Working at a spa…
Playing basketball…
Enjoying a lager!
If you know that this Tumblr happens to exist already, just don’t tell me. I’d rather live blissfully ignorant of my generally derivative life than look the blinding sad truth in the face. I do, however, note the existence of a calendar called NUNS HAVING FUN or something to that effect, which I would like to own. If you could mail it to me c/o the Guggenheim Museum, that would be much appreciated. Consider it a belated birthday present.
I Did Everything
May 1, 2016Sorry for the big gap between posts, my five devoted readers! I’ve been on vacation. I know what you’re thinking: ID, isn’t your whole life kind of a vacation? Uh, no, I have a full-time job being a garden variety neurotic, and that’s not an easy gig!
Anyway, last week in Jerusalem, I went to a gallery called the Museum on the Seam (so named because it is right on the Green Line.) Wasn’t overwhelmed by the art there, but I did like one piece called “It Was Me. Diary 1990-1999” by Italian artist Daniela Comani. It’s a text piece that imagines the major events of the 20th century as if they all happened to one individual. Here is the whole thing, and here (colon) is an excerpt:
February 20th. London. I took my life tonight. First I tried with an overdose of pills (150 antidepressants and 50 sleeping pills) but was saved in King s College hospital, where I hung myself 2 days later in the toilets in the middle of the night. February 21st. New York. I murdered Malcolm X during a speech in Harlem. February 22nd. I executed the siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl. February 23rd. Edinburgh. I cloned a sheep at the Roslin Institute: Dolly. February 24th. I presented ‘the 25 point program’ to the German Workers Party. February 25th. Unbloody putsch in the Philippines: I overthrew the president Ferdinando E. Marcos.”
My traveling companion (in life) didn’t like the piece, but I enjoyed it because I felt like no matter how obvious the conceit, it did make you think about each event as if it had happened to you for a millisecond. Also, it reminded me of some horror movie I’ve seen––but forget the name of––in which the Devil (or some evil force named otherwise) reveals him/itself to have been behind all the tragedies of history. A whiff of The Invisible Man, too.
BRITS ARE SO WEIRD
April 20, 2016From the Evening Standard
Royal Bets at 90/1
Bookmakers are taking thousands of pounds in bets about the royal family ahead of the Queen’s 90th birthday.
The public are betting on wagers including whether the Queen will share her opinion on the EU referendum, turn up at Ascot without a hat [ed note: audible gasp!] or give a one-to-one interview this year.
Royal fans can also bet on whether the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will have triplets.
The odds on these royal flutters are being set at 90/1 in recognition of the monarch’s 90th birthday tomorrow by bookmakers Coral, which was founded in the year the Queen was born.
Coral spokeswoman Nicola McGeady said: “In the last 90 years the British public have bet on royal births, marriages, hat colours, heirs to the throne, abdications and even Harry’s beard. There are plenty of punters who believe they can beat the bookies when it comes to betting on the royal family.”
Coral’s first bets on the monarchy began with Princess Elizabeth’s birth in 1926 over what she would be called. Elizabeth was a favourite at 2/1, Victoria second favourite at 3/1 while Mary and Alexandra were priced at 5/1.
Party Trick
April 15, 2016I’ve decided that from now on, when someone asks me what I do for a living, I’m going to respond, “It’s kind of complicated. Have you seen that movie Inception, with Leonardo DiCaprio? It’s basically that.”
A Girl and Her Gameboy
April 10, 2016When I was in maybe tenth grade or so, I read a little interview with Lisa Kudrow in InStyle Magazine (slow Sunday, I guess) in which she said that her absolute favorite stress reliever of all time was Tetris on Gameboy. I knew the sweet bliss of zoning out to Tetris myself. When my brothers and I were little, my mother used to buy us new video games for our handheld devices––back then, we had Gameboys and Sega Nomads––so we would stay relatively quiet during the sixteen-hour-plus car rides our family took every summer. Sonic the Hedgehog was a great favorite, but it was anxiety producing, as you were supposed to be aspiring to new levels. My brother had a Kirby game, which was fun, but a little bad-trippy (somehow I knew even at that age.) Tetris, on the other hand, never seemed to make me worry about my accomplishment; I was always just content to play. So streamlined, so clear and mathematical, that dinky digitized Russian theme song––heaven!
But by the time I read that little interview with Phoebe, Gameboy was a thing of my family’s past. Still, her mention of it stirred a longing in me that remained for the next ten years, until finally, I had thirty-odd bucks and some time to spare, which I spent browsing Ebay for old machines. Now, I am the proud owner of an old-ass Gameboy––the big, gray, clunky kind, not the sleeker color versions of the late nineties. Although the screen has fallen off a few times (thank G-d for superglue) I have only had to change the batteries once in the past two years. The most serious technical glitch I’ve encountered has been solved by blowing in the little slot at the top or rubbing the batteries until the machine goes on. Take that, iPhone! (And yes, I do believe playing it on the Game Boy is somehow more enjoyable than downloading it and playing it on my phone would be.) I play it everywhere: on the plane, on the train, on ferries to exotic islands off the coast of Sicily. Okay, so maybe I mainly play when I’m being transported somewhere, but still, I play a lot. People tend to find it pretty funny, and it makes me happy to see how joyfully nostalgic they get seeing this lovable relic. “Does this make you a hipster?” a lady on the New York City subway once asked, only half in jest. I don’t care! I thought to myself. I love Tetris! And if loving Tetris is wrong, I don’t wanna be right!
Recently I read this article about Rutherford Chang, an artist who is working on an ongoing project to beat the top Tetris score in the world (held by Uli Horner, a London-based architect.) Here are a few things he said about Tetris:
“Every 10 lines you complete, you advance one level and the pieces fall faster,” he says. “Eventually they fall so fast that you can’t keep up and you die. You can’t ever beat the game. It’s about squeezing in as much perfection as possible in this limited time before your inevitable death.”
Whether you read Tetris as a parable for life’s finitude or the savagery of capitalism, there’s no denying the focus it requires. “It’s a pretty brutal game,” says Chang. “It definitely requires a lot of concentration, where you only think about this rudimentary logic. It’s meditative.”
Meditative––that’s why I do it. It’s like my version of mindfulness. And for a split second after reading about Chang, I felt envious of him, sitting around all day playing Tetris and doing it to some legitimate end. But then I realized that if I were doing what he is doing, the game would cease to soothe me the way it does. Once something becomes an ambitious pursuit, it no longer can be relaxing (see also: writing.) And so for now, I remain a dedicated amateur.
A Gig for Me
April 7, 2016Back last year when I was researching a piece on Amish converts, I read Called to Be Amish: My Journey from Head Majorette to the Old Order by Marlene Miller, which is, as the title describes, Miller’s memoir of becoming Amish. She fell in love and eventually married a man who was born Amish but hadn’t, during their courtship and marriage, chosen to join the church (important note: the culturally popular notion of “rumspringa” isn’t always a year. Because Amish aren’t eligible for baptism into the church until maybe fifteen or older––varies somewhat from community to community––a teenager can put off joining the church for years, during which time he or she could feasibly explore the world. Shunning, as a postscript, really only happens when someone has joined the church and then reneged on his/her vows.) After they had their first child, the couple joined the church together.
Anyway, back to Miller: now that I know I don’t need her participation for said piece, I can say without fear that the book isn’t good. I mean, it is good in that the story is interesting and the perspective rare, but the writing isn’t going to get your blood flowing, if you’re into that kind of thing, which I am. I wouldn’t go so far as to say she shouldn’t write because she isn’t a writer (like I would with many celebrities who pen memoirs) but high art, this ain’t.
And yet––there was a moment in her prefatory acknowledgments that made me jealous about my lack of involvement with the text. Here it is:
“I’d like to thank Elsie Kline for typing my first draft. Because I wrote everything longhand, I’m sure she had a very difficult time.”
Now there is a job for me: typing up the memoirs of an Amish convert. Who is this Elsie Kline, and what kind of bribery does she accept?
Munich Outpost
April 4, 2016
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