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ofallingstar · 2 years

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List of books I read this year

Crush by Richard Silken

The Essential Brendan Kennelly by Brendan Kennelly

Upstream by Mary Oliver

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter

Letters To A Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Wuthering Heights by Charlotte Brontë

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The Poems of Octavio Paz by Octavio Paz

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by H.D. Lawrence

The Year of the Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Marianela by Benito Pérez Galdós

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Collected Poems by Patrick Kavanagh

In the Woods by Tana French

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Irish Fairy and Folk Tales by W.B. Yeats

De Profundis by Oscar Wilde

Pygmalion by George Bernand Shaw

Parallax by Sinéad Morrisey

When All Is Said by Anne Griffin

In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu

Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami

Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews

Paradise Lost by John Milton

The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Castle in the Air by Diana Wynne Jones

The Bone People by Keri Hulme

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians by Noam Chomsky & Ilan Pappé

On Palestine by Noam Chomsky & Ilan Pappé

House of Many Ways by Dianne Wynne Jones

Spells: New and Selected Poems by Annie Finch

A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

The Vanishing Half by Bret Bennett

Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners by Therese Oneill

Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara

A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

The Mirror by Marlys Millhiser

Metamorphoses by Ovid

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin

Howards End by E.M. Forster

The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

Salomé by Oscar Wilde

La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils

A Little Larger Than The Entire Universe: Selected Poems by Fernando Pessoa

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris

Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The Midnight Palace by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The Watcher in the Shadows by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Rape: A Love Story by Joyce Carol Oates

Horseradish by Lemony Snicket

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Night Shift by Stephen King

Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison

The Entity by Frank De Felitta

The Complete Grims' Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

The Roses of May by Dot Hutchison

First Person Singular: Stories by Haruki Murakami

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

Plainwater: Essays and Poetry by Anne Carson

Dream Work by Mary Oliver

You can follow me or add me as a friend on Goodreads.

#about brenda #books #booksblr #goodreads #post largo

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mas-o-kissed · 2 years

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Was subjected to the astoundingly bad Inspector G/adget film and seeing Matthew Broder/ick have an existential crisis over becoming a robot man may have put me off writing robot whump/angst until further notice

#IM NOT ME ANYMORE (teeth chattering sound effect) (head extends through the ceiling)#lord have mercy

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davebuckleslefthand · 3 years

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the USA makes me so upset! U.S. CITIZENS ARISE!

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chiseler · 4 years

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Mitchell Leisen: How’s About It?

Mitchell Leisen was a major American film director. He belongs in the first rank, not the second tier, where he has often been placed by those who value the scripts he was given by Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett more than what he actually did with those scripts. Leisen’s name was usually written in sloping cursive in his opening credits, and that set the mood for what he had to offer. His was a gentle style, a deliberately unobtrusive style, smooth and gliding, attentive to nuances, visual and emotional.

Leisen made a point of nearly always moving the camera only when it is following a character who is moving right along with it, and the edits in his movies are as invisible as possible. He made three films that are undisputed classics: Easy Living (1937), written by Sturges, Midnight (1939), written by Wilder and Brackett, and Remember the Night (1939), written by Sturges. All three of these classic Leisen movies are partly about pretending to be something you’re not in order to move up or over into another social atmosphere or class and take on a new identity, and this theme is something that always interested Leisen particularly.

He got his start making costumes and dressing sets for Cecil B. DeMille, and he also made costumes for Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. That training shows through in his later work, that sense of fantasy and beauty for its own sake. Leisen had a fetish for absolute authenticity when he did period pictures, and he took this fetish to nearly Erich Von Stroheim lengths if he had the money to spend. Remember the peacock headdress that he designed for Gloria Swanson in DeMille’s Male and Female (1919), or the sexy harem pants he put on Fairbanks for The Thief of Bagdad (1924), or the barely-there garments he designed for Claudette Colbert in The Sign of the Cross (1932) and you can get a first sense of Leisen’s aesthetic: hopeful, fantastical, erotic. And he was a pretender himself on some of these early movies because he was very skillful at making sets and crowd scenes look more opulent than they actually were given some of the budgets he had to work with.

He took the reins from nominal director Stuart Walker for two films that proved his range: Tonight Is Ours (1933), a high comedy that begins with a sexy masked ball, and The Eagle and the Hawk (1933), as grim and concentrated an anti-war film as you will find from this era. Leisen next graduated to prestige pictures like Cradle Song (1933) and Death Takes a Holiday (1934), with its high-flown Maxwell Anderson script. Leisen was fond of Death Takes a Holiday all his life, and he even wanted to re-make it in the late 1940s, but it has not held up as well as some of his lesser-known pictures from the 1930s.

After Murder at the Vanities (1934), a backstage movie with some odd musical numbers, Leisen took flight with three pictures that demonstrated the full scope of his talent. What makes a really great director, a major director? The ability to take a poor script, like the one Leisen was given for Behold My Wife! (1934), and make it into something that moves like a dream and seems inevitable. While you watch Behold My Wife!, there is a double consciousness of how outlandish and slapdash the plot and dialogue are and how Leisen transcends this through pacing, framing, and staging, so that there is always something to delight the eye. Leisen movies generally have a difficult-to-describe kind of creamy look, as if every person and table and chair were covered in the same sort of protective satin sheen.

He used a similarly fast, super-controlled pace for Four Hours to Kill! (1935), another backstage movie where Leisen himself plays the orchestra leader but you never see the numbers on stage. A kind of musical proto-noir, this movie depends on Richard Barthelmess, who is playing a criminal waiting to be taken to jail, and Leisen is alert to Barthelmess’s needs and sensitive to his big scene, where his character talks about his unhappy past. And then Leisen was given a script (by Norman Krasna) and two stars, Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray, that were particularly congenial to his style, and the result was his first classic, Hands Across the Table (1935), a rather anguished comedy about love and the urge for security. Leisen had mastered form, and now he mastered the content that interested him, good-bad people navigating their own wants and desires and what they will do for them. For Leisen, mixed emotions are really the only emotions possible.

In all of his most characteristic films, Leisen’s characters are at a crisis point and need to decide to take a chance and see what they can get away with to become another version of themselves. There is lots of comedy in a situation like this, of course, but Leisen always hints at the dark underside of pretending. There is an American urge in these pictures that says, “What I say I am is what I am,” and that urge is usually naïve (think of early Joan Crawford heroines). Leisen looks at this urge from a height of sophistication, almost always warmly and tenderly, but sometimes he lets a really grim insight slip through. Think of Carole Lombard’s anti-social asides in Hands Across the Table, or that harrowing scene where Barbara Stanwyck goes home to her grudge-holding and cruelly puritanical mother in Remember the Night and you will feel the hurt that animates Leisen’s search for a created world of his own.

In many ways, the 1930s were Leisen’s best creative period, where he turned out beautifully balanced and finished entertainments like 13 Hours by Air (1936). He was a romantic who had a special way of visually enfolding the lovers in his movies that is almost Frank Borzage-like, and he glorifies very different women in what must be the best close-ups of their careers: look at some of the close-ups of the melancholy Sylvia Sidney in Behold My Wife! and then look at the close-ups of the wised-up Joan Bennett in 13 Hours by Air and see how Leisen gives them the same glamorizing treatment without ever losing what makes them so individual. Even pure assignments like Artists and Models Abroad (1938) glow with a kind of dreamlike assurance, as if to say, “Why shouldn’t a comedy look beautiful?”

And when Leisen had a meatier script, like Swing High, Swing Low (1937), which also starred Lombard and MacMurray, he was capable of virtuoso work that blended comedy and drama so seamlessly that it’s difficult to tell where one leaves off and the other begins. He did some Sturges-like slapstick for Easy Living, including the famous automat scene where the windows fly open and everybody grabs at the food, which was his idea. But for Remember the Night, Leisen pared down the Sturges script, cutting unnecessary scenes and verbose dialogue until he had what he wanted, a portrait of a hard-boiled woman who starts to long for the warmth of a “why not?” idealized mid-West home. Remember the Night is probably Leisen’s finest film, and a peak in his career, a comedy-drama or a dramatic comedy all whipped together until the consistency is exquisite and just right.

After the very sensitive Hold Back the Dawn (1941), a Wilder-Brackett script about a hard-boiled male gigolo (Charles Boyer) pretending to love a sheltered, repressed girl (Olivia de Havilland) until his feelings actually become genuine, Leisen’s career settled in for a few years to minor comedies, as if wartime austerity had affected his budgets, his scripts, and his imagination. In 1944, he did two movies in color, Lady in the Dark and Frenchman’s Creek, one anti-feminist and one feminist, and both rather nightmarishly disconnected and self-indulgent.

Leisen was going through a crisis in his personal life by the mid-1940s, and it showed in his work. He was mainly gay, but he didn’t want to be, and so he had married a fledgling opera singer (“a horror” according to the sharp-tongued Ray Milland) and he was carrying on a tortured affair with costumer Natalie Visart while also pursuing men. Leisen’s loyal secretary Eleanor Broder told David Chierichetti, the author of the definitive Leisen book, Mitchell Leisen: Hollywood Director, that her boss tried taking hormone shots at one point because he thought they might eradicate his homosexuality, but of course that didn’t work. Leisen lived with the pilot Eddie Anderson in the late 1930s, and Anderson left him for Shirley Ross, the actress who talk-sings “Thanks for the Memory” with Bob Hope in The Big Broadcast of 1938, an unusually sentimental scene within his work that Leisen insisted on. When that picture finished, he had a heart attack, and his health was never quite the same afterwards.

In the 1940s, after Visart had gotten pregnant with his child and lost it, Leisen took up with the dancer Billy Daniels, and his unhappiness grew. Daniels dances in what has to be Leisen’s worst feature, Masquerade in Mexico (1945), a semi-remake of Midnight that is so distracted and poorly timed that it would seem to give credence to Billy Wilder’s many complaints about Leisen over the years in interviews; if you were to watch Masquerade in Mexico right after Midnight, it would seem like a mark against Leisen as an artist in his own right rather than a servant of superior scripts where he could get them. Daniels is actually the only thing this movie has going for it: he’s an exciting dancer, and an intriguing screen presence, sexy, petulant, a little dangerous. Many in Leisen’s inner circle disliked Daniels, but maybe Masquerade in Mexico might work if it could just be Daniels dancing as Leisen watches.

The blandness of the décor in something like Suddenly It’s Spring (1947) is a real comedown from his Art Deco 1930s pictures, but Leisen rallied in this period with some of his best and most personal films, starting with Kitty (1945), a sumptuous Gainsborough period piece with all the trimmings and a Pygmalion subject that activates all of Leisen’s interest in pretending and “passing” as something you are not. Best of all from this time is Song of Surrender (1949), an uncommonly severe movie about a New England girl named Abigail (Wanda Hendrix) who finds a way out of her repressive environment by listening to music. What Abigail feels in Song of Surrender is surely what Leisen himself must have often felt as a young man growing up in the mid-West at the turn of the last century, and so this picture, which he said he didn’t much like, is his secret movie, his confession movie. It’s a great film, daringly stark and stripped-down, and it is as unerringly paced and controlled as all of his best 1930s work; there are moments when it feels like a precursor to Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) in its insistence on the will power needed for a woman to find aesthetic and sexual fulfillment.

Leisen did an intriguing noir with Stanwyck called No Man of Her Own (1950) and an overlooked, charming adaptation of J. M. Barrie called Darling, How Could You! (1951), which is filled with longing for family life that Leisen certainly knows is a fantasy like any of his others. (How poignant it is when Joan Fontaine says in that movie that if her children are going to love her they mustn’t “think me over first.”) He spent twenty years working at Paramount Studios, and he was a creature of the studio system; when the studio system went, so did he, but not before one more diverting small musical, The Girl Most Likely (1958), which was the last feature made at RKO. “When the studio decided we no longer needed a certain department, it was shut down and if we needed something after that, we had to make do ourselves,” Leisen said. “It was really eerie.”

Ill-health and an unwarranted reputation for spending too much money kept Leisen mainly working for TV in his last years, so that he was back to low budgets and bringing in his own furniture to dress his sets. He had been fired from Bedevilled (1955) for hitting on one of the straight actors he was working with (the actor complained to MGM), and this put another shadow over his reputation. He had made Fred MacMurray’s career, but when he tried to get work as a director on MacMurray’s hit TV show My Three Sons, it was no go. “He sent me a telegram asking for the job,” MacMurray said. “He was, well, you know, a homosexual and he had gotten into some trouble on a picture he was making in Europe. With the three young boys we had working on the show, I just didn’t think it was right. So I never answered the telegram.”

It was his women who stayed loyal to Leisen in his final years, both his secretary Broder (who was a lesbian), and his old lover Natalie Visart, who had never really gotten over her love for him and came to stay with him toward the end (Visart’s son Peter was killed in a gay-bashing in the 1970s). Leisen’s responses to David Chierichetti’s questions in their interview book are unfailingly candid, insightful, and juicy, but his standing has never ascended to the level of that of Preston Sturges or Billy Wilder, even though his visual style was far more developed than theirs, and his point of view arguably more sophisticated and certainly more kind-hearted. He was a romantic with an edge of disquiet, and this made for matchlessly rich pictures, pulsing with hope and with pain.

Leisen knew about all aspects of picture making, and he has the requisite number of classics for entrance to the pantheon, plus a whole slew of other pictures of interest. He made Remember the Night and Song of Surrender. He made Midnight and Kitty. And he made Easy Living and Darling, How Could You! Those are all heights, and from different periods, and they prove the consistency of his inventiveness and the distinctiveness of his talent. His creativity came out of personal unhappiness on the one hand and unprecedented creative license and support under the old Hollywood studio system on the other. We will not see that particular combination again.

by Dan Callahan

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feministiclilflower · 7 years

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So Sad Today - Melissa Broder

“There aren’t many ways to find comfort in this world. We must take it where we can get it, even in the darkest, most disgusting places. Nobody asks to be born. No one signs a form that says, You have my permission to make me exist. Babies are born, because parents feel that they themselves are not enough. So, parents, never condemn us for trying to fill our existential holes, when we are but the fruit of your own vain attempts to fill yours. It’s your fault we’re here to deal with the void in the first place.”

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pocoyoterrorism · 4 years

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In an age when nation-states have ever fewer levers (with economic policy and other issues transferred to Brussels or homogenized by globalization), political debate is bound to focus on one thing they do still control: borders. This has been dramatized by coronavirus; while the response demands quarantine at a hyper-local level (not just national borders), the crisis feeds sentiments (constantly affirmed by the media) of outside danger, insecurity, and powerlessness faced with a global threat.

David Broder, “When Coronavirus Made Italy Go Insane,” Jacobin

#jacobin magazine #jacobin #globalization #borders #coronavirus #capitalism #neoliberalism #david broder

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berniesrevolution · 5 years

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JACOBIN MAGAZINE

Recent weeks have seen a shock to France’s elites. President Emmanuel Macron’s fuel tax hike sparked widespread protests, with road blockades across the country and violent clashes with police in Paris. The gilets jaunes movement (so named after protesters’ distinctive yellow vests) imposed a humiliating climbdown by the liberal president, who was forced to abandon the tax and raise the minimum wage.

These protests have given voice to often-ignored parts of French society. But while much media has shown its contempt for those involved, the movement has found a vocal ally in Pamela Anderson. The former Baywatchstar and Playboy model has spoken out on multiple causes before, from her pro-animal rights work with PETA to her environmental stances and support for earthquake relief in Haiti. Now she has become a keen backer of the revolt against austerity.

In her tweets and blog posts Anderson emphasized the wider importance of the protests, terming them a battle against the “politics represented by Macron and the 99% who are fed up with inequality, not only in France, all over the world.” She similarly responded to claims of protester violence by tweeting “I despise violence . . . but what is the violence of all these people and burned luxurious cars, compared to the structural violence of the French — and global — elites?”

Showing her broad interest in the political upheavals currently gripping the continent, she has in recent days also voiced her support for left-wing UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn while also sharply criticizing Italy’s far-right interior minister Matteo Salvini for his racist agenda.

In an interview with Jacobin’s David Broder, Anderson and philosopher Srećko Horvat discussed the French protests, Europe’s crisis, and Anderson’s own activism.

David Broder:

The gilets jaunes protests in France have drawn a lot of scorn from media and political elites, but your comments have been supportive, noting that this “revolt has been simmering for some years.” What do you think these protests represent? Do they respond to a mood that you see in France more generally, since you’ve been living there?

Pamela Anderson:

My comments were at first provoked by the images of violence. Everyone was hypnotized. Why? And why did it come as such a surprise? What stands behind the violence? I wanted to understand. I know it’s not easy to accept me as I am. I stir things up in an unconventional way, and will continue to do so.

A few days after the protests broke out in France, I traveled to Milan. There I found Mr. Salvini in the newspapers saying that “Macron is a problem for the French.” But I see it differently. I think it’s a European problem. In the same way, the rising xenophobia in Italy is a European problem. Not just an Italian one.

Just before I arrived in Italy, the top Italian chef Vittorio Castellani was told not to use “foreign recipes” on his TV show. I love Italian food. But what is Italian — or any — food without “foreign influences”? I am sure Mr. Salvini enjoys “foreign food” too. OK, we moved on from the gilets jaunes . . .

Srećko Horvat:

But this is an excellent detection of the problem. This actually started in 2009 with Silvio Berlusconi’s campaign against “non-Italian” food in Italy, it is a continuous process of “normalization” — the slow introduction of measures or even laws which in a near future will seem “normal.”

If I remember rightly, it was Vittorio Castellani who, already then, almost ten years ago, pointed out that there is no such thing as authentic “Italian food,” because tomato came from Peru and spaghetti from China. So, without foreign influence “Italian food” would literally taste different. When you say that Salvini probably enjoys “foreign food” then you name the true problem.

As with the case of Macron talking to gilets jaunes from his salon doré surrounded by gold decorations, there is a disconnection between the political elites and the people. Moreover, this is utter cynicism on the part of the ruling elites. As for France, it became obvious that the “world-spirit on the horseback” (as Hegel saw Napoleon, and Jürgen Habermas sees Macron) is nothing other than Jacques Lacan’s king who is mad to believe he is a king.

When a cabinet minister from Macron’s party, trying to show the gulf between the working poor and political elite, complains that Paris dinners cost “€200 without wine,” it is another clear sign of the disconnect between the elites and the people.

The gilets jaunes believe, and they are right, that Macron doesn’t live in the “real world.” At the same time, these days you could have seen, as if it came from the alternate reality of the Situationists themselves, a graffiti simply saying “Pamela Anderson Présidente!”

David Broder:

French government officials and some media claim that the protesters are ignoring the need for environmental protection. As someone with a keen interest in conservation, do you think the gilets jaunes‘ own demands can fit together with a green agenda?

Pamela Anderson:

I do not think the poor should pay for climate change. Yet it is the poor who are paying the biggest price. Some say that the protesters in France protested so they could continue polluting the planet. But I do not think this is true. They protest because the rich keep destroying the planet. And the poor are paying.

In 2013, after the devastating earthquake, I visited Haiti to distribute aid. I visited a children’s hospital and refugee camps. Again, it was the poor paying the price. Since then, many grassroots projects have been going on in Haiti that show what a green transition could look like.

The protests in France started when President Macron announced an increase in carbon and air pollution taxes. This was supposed to collect more money for the state budget and also motivate people to use alternatives to diesel-fueled cars. Macron would like to ban diesel cars by 2040. But the French state encouraged people to buy diesel-fueled cars for many years.

For example, in 2016, 62 percent of cars in France were diesel cars, as well as 95 percent of all vans and small lorries. So it is no wonder that many people view the new policy as a total betrayal.

Getting a new car is probably not a big deal for President Macron and his ministers. But it is way too difficult for many people who are already financially stretched. Many poor people will not be able to get to work, especially if there is no reliable public transport in place. Many old people will not be able to get to the shops or to the doctor.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #jacobin #jacobin magazine #pamela anderson #macron #environmental justice #protests #yellow vests #austerity #neoliberalism

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allthebrazilianpolitics · 5 years

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Sowing the Seeds of Bolsonaro

Far-right president Jair Bolsonaro was lifted to power by the mass mobilization of the Brazilian middle classes. But it wouldn't have been possible without years of failed austerity policies.

Brazil is today in the grip of a terrifying far-right regime, as Jair Bolsonaro’s government embarks on rolling back decades of advances for workers, women, and LGBT people. His election campaign was notable for the often-violent mobilization of paramilitary forces and the organized Right. Yet his success did not come from a vacuum. Bolsonaro’s rise to power was just the latest low point in a political crisis including the judicial coup against Dilma Rousseff’s center-left Workers’ Party (PT) government and the damaging imposition of austerity on the Brazilian economy by Dilma herself as well as interim president Michel Temer.

Indeed, the economic turmoil of recent years already marked the undoing of many of the advances made by the PT in power, while also highlighting its contradictions of that party. This is highlighted in a new book, Economy for the Few: The Social Impact of Fiscal Policy in Brazil. Here, economists Esther Dweck, Ana Luíza Matos de Oliveira, and Pedro Rossi show that austerity, presented in Brazil as a “technical necessity representing the only option,” was in fact a “deliberate policy choice.” Its consequences were disastrous.

Jacobin’s Giacomo Gabbuti and David Broder spoke to the authors about the economic conditions for Bolsanaro’s rise, the advances made by the PT (and their limits), and the lessons for the Latin American left.

#brazil #brazilian politics #economy #politics #workers' party #luiz inacio lula da silva #dilma rousseff #michel temer #mod nise da silveira

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outweek30 · 5 years

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Last year, the U.S. government held a baby auction. They were selling licenses to "Broder's babies" — drugs whose anti-HIV activity was discovered in the National Cancer Institute labs of Dr. Sam Broder. It was Broder who discovered the test-tube anti-HIV activity of AZT, ddC (dideoxycytidine) and ddI (dideoxyinosine). Although these drugs qualify as orphans under the u.s. Orphan Drug Act (which give the licensee tax breaks and a limited monopoly), there was no shortage of would-be sponsors. In the end, giant pharmaceuticals got the orphans: Hoffman-LaRoche got ddC and Bristol Myers (aided, no doubt, by an executive's role as a top Bush fundraiser) got ddI.

[...]

In June and July, 1989, ACT UP representatives met with the scientists from Bristol-Myers who are designing the ddI trials. It was probably the first time in history that a drug company met with people living with a disease to plan together trials of a drug to treat that disease. If the pharmaceutical industry starts to work with people with AIDS, rather than being their antagonist, the crisis may be over sooner.

— Mark Harrington, "Political Science: A ddI Directory," OutWeek Magazine No. 8, August 14, 1989, p. 30.

#outweek #issue 8 #lgbt history #hiv aids #act up #drug research #ddi #azt #bristol meyers #sam broder #mark harrington #political science #commentary

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sandwichbully · 5 years

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The Wedge Table (yes, again), 10 November 2018

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One time, Soft Kathryn called me Pasta Boi, a title I cannot deny, as I am, indeed, a pasta boi. Used to be I was a Pasta Slut but the word slut has been contentious for a while and only lately it’s starting to be OK to self-identify as a slut for certain things, like you’re a Train Slut if you fuck with some Amtrak or a Cathedral Slut if you’re down with the Vatican. I don’t know, I say fuck it, play it safe, don’t piss off the SJWs; Soft Kathryn calls me a Pasta Boi, I’m a Pasta Boi. Everybody on board with that? Anybody feel like calling me out for some shit? I’m a Pasta Boi, goddamnit. What problems could you possibly have with the Pasta Boi? ANYhoo, seeing as how I am - Wait. Am I a pasta boi or the pasta boi? We’ll figure that out later. Look, I was out of pasta and it’s 19° Fahrenheit (that’s -7° Celsius for my metric fanbase) and I figured that was a good enough excuse to go back to the Wedge and get that last sandwich. The tuna melt.

Goddamn, that is a blurry-assed photo. Anyway, I know I could’ve picked up a box of spaghetti from Hark’s across the street or even just gone down to the CVS for a box of spaghetti, but it was lunch time and neither of those places have a full-service deli with a limited line of seasonal signature sandwiches. And!? This is tuna melt weather. So I go in there and this time I’m greeted by a bespectacled young woman and I tell her I just need a tuna melt to go, she says sure, hands me my ticket, and I go off to get lost in the (two) racks of food trying to find pasta because, while I am a pasta boi, I’m not seeing the pasta I’m used to: The red and white boxes of Essential Everyday, the green boxes of Creamette, the blue boxes of Buy Any Other Brand But This Homophobic Shit; I’m having that classist crisis again, feeling out of my element, too working class and dumb to figure out how to navigate a co-op, here he is, everybody! Charlie from the Trailer Park! Can’t find his way through the tiniest co-op and doesn’t listen to Vampire Weekend! And then I nut up because, yeah, motherfucker, I am Charlie from Southeast Toledo and guess what: I like Black Sabbath, suck my dick. Where the fuck is the - Oh, here it is. It comes in... bags? Why the fuck - I thought these motherfuckers were supposed to be earth friendly, why is the pasta in plastic bags instead of recyclable cardboard boxes? What the fuck sense does this make? I pick up the pack of spaghetti and I look on the back. Under directions, it says to bring 5oz (150mL and I did that conversion, you’re welcome) to a boil and add 16oz (455g, again, I’m doing the heavy lifting) of pasta and I mutter, “What kind of maniac cooks a whole pack of pasta in one go?” Hell, even as one of a family of four, I don’t think I ever saw my mom cook a whole box of pasta in one go. I mean, maybe she did, it would make sense, there’s fucking four of us but does this manufacturer assume... I mean, who the fuck cooks a whole thing of pasta in one go? Jesus Jehosaphat. Maniacs. Absolute maniacs. So I got the fusili since I’ll be making a simple tomato and garlic sauce tonight that will love those little nooks and crannies to cling to. Yes, I have studied up on pairing my pastas and my sauces because I am a pasta boi, outed and confirmed. Then I grab a blood orange Hi-Ball and go over to the register and some old fart is just standing there with his back to it, not getting the point that I’m trying to get in line, thus a woman just walks around him up to the register and he looks at her and looks at me and looks annoyed - don’t give me that look, motherfucker, I have Aerosmith on vinyl, good Aerosmith, drugged up Aerosmith, I will knock you out in the parking lot. Anyway, nobody’s paying attention to the woman at the register and a line is forming and then one of the guys from the deli says he can get me on the other register and I turn to follow him but then my name is called and I grab my sandwich and I get rung up and I get outside, and I load my bag and I come home.

You and me, we’ve been on an adventure together, haven’t we? A real emotional roller coaster? We've had to deal with inwardly-directed class shame as manufactured by capitalism; we’ve talked about putting our money in the right places, like not certain pasta brands that come in blue boxes; we’ve discussed identity issues as prescribed by a person who identifies herself as an oven but uses she/her pronouns. We have been all over the map so far and I’m sure all you’ve wanted this whole time was to know how the fucking sandwich tasted. You want to know if you should give your money to these people. You want to know how tough of a call it is between Get Your Wings and Toys In The Attic because even though the track listing on Toys... has the obvious bangers, ... Wings has some definite sleeper agents that will fuck you up. For your patience, for your companionship on this journey, mon frer, I will now answer all these questions.

Holy shit, this is the best thing I’ve put in my mouth this week. Now, I didn’t look at the menu too close so, disclaimer, up front, I don’t know what kind of cheese they used. Swiss would be the obvious choice but I looked at the cheese itself and the holes were tinier and not round. I’m guessing, and I’d be surprised if I were wrong, this is havarti. It didn’t have the high-pitched notes of Swiss, either, which would have definitely stood out because, here’s the deal: You could taste everything individually on the sandwich. The tuna salad was creamy and I’m guessing they used an organic mayo because of course they would use organic and 1) this didn’t taste like Hellman’s and I’m a slut for Hellman’s so I would know, 2) this didn’t taste like Kraft, and 3) it didn’t taste like aioli because I detected no hint of extra virgin olive oil. Thus, organic mayo is my guess and it played nicely with the tuna, probably because the mayo to tuna ratio greatly favored the fish, so while I could detect the presence of mayo, what I was tasting primarily in that concoction was the tuna. Appearance-wise, the tuna salad looked like exactly every other tuna salad you’ve ever had: Somebody opened a can, emptied it into a bowl, threw in a dollop of mayo, and beat the shit out of it with a fork until it stopped looking like it was once a thing of flesh and now just shreds of unidentifiable protein. I get it: There aren’t that many ways to make tuna salad, so I’m not going to dock points for the look of the thing. The aforementioned maybe-havarti was smooth and creamy, which is how havarti ought to taste. I thought it could have stood to be a bit more melty, this is a tuna melt after all, and despite my visual inspection and my self-assuredness that this is havarti, the doubt still lingers because while it didn’t taste like Swiss, it didn’t melt like havarti, and we all know that Swiss is a bit obstinate when it comes to melting. It will do it but it takes a bit more cajoling than your softer cheeses like your jacks, your colbies, and, of course, your havartis. Again, probably not Swiss, but there will always be the doubt in my mind. Fuck it. I just looked at the menu. The answer we were looking for was gruyere. Gruyere. Just proving to you, once again, that I am capable of being wrong. I am human and I am just like you. So, yeah, the gruyere was good, even if I didn’t know until just now that’s what it was. It was smooth and creamy, just like havarti. But the important part is that I could taste it separately from and in concert with the other ingredients (even if I couldn’t identify what kind of cheese it was). But the real child star of this made-for-TV adaptation of a beloved series of child detective novels grown up to appear ironically on the convention circuit and still say their cutesy catch phrase thirty years later before snapping and mowing down a gaggle of parents with a hedge trimmer at a Chuck E. Cheese would be the pickled onions, sharp and sour at the same time, balancing out the low creaminess of the tuna salad and the cheese and the midrange of the whole grain bread with high notes in brassy timbres, maybe even acrylic timbres would be more fitting, like Ornette Coleman’s saxophone. It provided what other tuna melts are missing: A full spectrum of notes. This tuna melt was like the Italians at Broder’s and Kramarczuk’s and the Reubens at Colossal Cafe and Tiny Diner: It was perfectly balanced, minimally fucked with. And I know you’re probably rolling your eyes at me raving about a tuna melt and comparing it to some of the best sandwiches in the city but it’s like this: The reason you (and even me) think tuna melts suck is because all we’ve ever been handed is shitty tuna melts. The most creative we’ve ever gotten with them is using Swiss instead of American. Maybe we tried fancifying it by adding capers or putting tarragon in the tuna salad and it just didn’t happen right. And then we’ve walked into the greasy spoon and we see the tuna melt on the menu and we wonder how fresh is that tuna salad and we skip it and if we do order it (with every nervous caution in the world), what we get is a grilled cheese with tuna salad in it. We’ve had nothing but shitty tuna melts our whole lives so it never occurred to us that if we just treated them differently, if we just treated them like they could be good, if we just took a step back and considered the core components and asked what was too much and what was missing and saw this was meant to be different from a grilled cheese with tuna salad in it, we could have a good one. There’s a reason that this sandwich has its own name and isn’t just “grilled cheese with tuna salad” and it’s the same reason we don’t call a Reuben a “corned beef and sauerkraut” or an Italian a “three meat and banana peppers” or a Club “turkey BLT triangles”. It’s a distinct and established entity and, unfortunately, people have stopped treating it like one and instead started treating it like a grilled cheese with tuna salad in it. Not saying the Wedgetable has brought back the sandwich like it’s the fucking messiah, I’m saying that they’ve treated it right. They’ve done right by it. It was a damned good sandwich and I don’t regret paying the eight bucks for it. And what it lacks in size, it more than makes up for in flavor. You can taste everything individually and everything compliments everything else. It’s worth at least one visit in the Wedgetable’s direction, I would encourage you to give them your money. Also, this is, I believe, our first tag for “tuna melt”. Oh and Toys In The Attack has for sure three radio hits but Get Your Wings has “Lord of the Thighs” which is just a thousand percent of your daily recommended dose of raunch, nast, and sweat pressed into wax, so that’s a winner.

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#2018 #Whittier #Tuna Melt #Aerosmith #Pasta Boi

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