Not knowing for sure what the normal road I take between my home and Gothenburg might be like, I opted to drive (yet again) more than 100 kms out of my way to ensure that I would take a safe route. But it turned out that it was about +7C everywhere, so in the week I have been away, everything melted and any road would probably have been fine. These long, long drives remind me of the old days, driving endlessly to get somewhere – anywhere in the US.
I stopped on the way home, though, to pick up ingredients for the upcoming baking extravaganza. Always a challenge – I can find virtually any type of gelatin or sweetener a person could want but no Christmas sprinkles/jimmies.
I am going to start this post by writing that I am well-aware of the gross oversimplification of everything I am writing. It is a train of thought I am following without delving into any specific issues in a meaningful way. I just had a lot of thoughts following Nelson Mandela’s passing on the nature of justice, race and humanity that I wanted to express, however disjointed and surface-level they are.
In the wake of Nelson Mandela’s death, and even during his life, he had achieved a kind of sainthood status, untouchable… which is fine except that he was human. A great human, yes. But, as some media outlets have reported, he had a lot of “non-mainstream” things to say that exposed the hypocrisies he saw in all kinds of things, such as, and perhaps most notably, American power/hegemony. Most of these key statements are left out of the soft version of his obituaries, and the powers-that-be who might be less than comfortable with that part of Mandela can easily ignore those things.
His death brings forth the question, for example, “Who is a terrorist?” It depends on who asks the question. Who defines what a terrorist is – and how does that change? When Nelson Mandela went to prison, he was seen as a terrorist. Many South Africans of all races went to jail and fought for his cause and the cause of racial equality (making it something of a “badge of honor” – at least according to the South Africans I have known who had criminal records for political agitation and protesting) to have a criminal record within the apartheid system. What better evidence is there of the commitment to social justice or to any cause of conscience? The whole concept of a criminal record automatically carrying a negative connotation is flawed because the offense makes a difference.
Many would cite Palestinian organizations and individuals as terrorists, and Israel certainly treats them like they all are. But who is the real terrorist in that scenario? How can a country occupied by people whose forebears went through something as ghastly as the Holocaust ever treat another people in the ways the Israelis treat the Palestinians? Isn’t that kind of treatment another form of terrorism? What is the difference between armed resistance and terrorism? Or even just resistance versus terrorism? We have seen history filled with people who resisted, armed or not, who seem to be called terrorists for their way of thinking, for their ideas. What about, for example, the Kosovo Liberation Army that sought independence from the Yugoslav union in the 1990s. Compared to the military apparatus of Serbia, from which it aimed to secede, you could hardly call the KLA a well-armed adversary. Serbs will tell stories about all the “terror” perpetrated by the KLA, but in the end it was the Serbs who were found guilty of violence and terror by the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia.
That said, many people believe in causes, to the degree that they would die for them. At what point are those causes deemed morally just by the mainstream? That is not to say “majority” – but by a loud and vocal enough mainstream that whatever the cause is becomes bigger and favour for one side or the other of a cause tips in one direction or another. Apartheid is an easy one for the liberal, equality-minded person. On the whole, it is wrong, and there are no two ways about it. On the surface, of course, the United States ended slavery and race becomes less divisive all the time. After all, the first African-American, truly multicultural president was elected to the highest political office in the nation. I personally did not think that would happen in my lifetime. But these strides do not mean that race is not still an issue. For some people, for reasons I cannot begin to understand, it is. Whether or not people in American society face a lack of opportunity or are more likely to experience poverty, etc. Is tied to race or is a multifaceted problem that is more socioeconomic in nature, with race playing one part in the bigger picture, I cannot say with any degree of expertise. It is always much more complicated than just one thing. But to say that there is equality would be complete and total bullshit.
The point, though, was to say that some issues carry a certain moral certitude (even if this is only in hindsight and the passage of much time). Slavery and apartheid are two such issues.
But then, something like gay marriage has been, at least in the United States and some of the more conservative parts of Europe, illegal without much to push the issue either way until recently. In 25 or 50 years (??) it may be that we can look back on the fight to love and marry whomever you want to and shake our heads at how it was ever a question. In 25 years, maybe this “moral certitude” will creep in. The tide in much of America has shifted away from trying to legislate gay marriage into non-existence and has been replaced in many cases by total indifference and in even more cases outright support. I am well aware that there are large swaths of the population who will never support it, never accept it and will fight until the day they die for a Constitutional amendment to try to ensure that marriage is a man-woman thing. But assuming that the current trend continues to move forward on the path it is currently on, at some point perhaps gay marriage will become passé. Wouldn’t that be something? It’s so common no one bothers to comment on it or think about it. (It’s a little bit like that in Scandinavia already – it just does not matter who you are paired up with. It’s your life.)
But many people believe in causes and take them to extremes. Some of those causes are questionable but clearly meant something to the people involved in them. As an example, I watched the film The Baader-Meinhof Complex, based on the true story of the Red Army Faction (or Baader-Meinhof Gang), which conducted its own acts of “protest”, mostly in the 1970s, in militant and violent opposition to the then-West German government (which they considered fascist). It was considered a terrorist organization, and most of its activities were indeed violent. But they did indeed believe in their cause. But cult leaders and their followers also believe in a cause. (Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple and suicide-by-KoolAid in Guyana; David Koresh and the Branch Davidians who were killed by US federal agents at their compound in Waco, Texas, etc. The list could go on.) Did a cause like the Red Army Faction start off with such terrible intentions? Or is it just the tactics that eventually make the cause insupportable?
Anyway, back to race and the general state of affairs in the world we live in. Most alarming is that while we want to believe in the triumph of “racelessness” – Mandela “united” and reconciled a nation left in tatters thanks to apartheid; Obama became president in a fairly racist country… some of the (somehow) more unexpected racism comes from places that seem, at the same time, both improbable and common – beauty pageants. Not to start down the road of “what is beauty” (which is also a minefield) – but when an Indian-American woman won the Miss America title a few months ago, there was an uproar in social media channels that re-exposed the raw reality of American racism and the tendency toward discrimination. And why? Today I see that the newly crowned Miss France, who is mixed-race (white French and Beninese), is experiencing the very same hatred from all these anonymous sources who insist that she is “not French”.
But – short of exploring the complex questions of national identity (what makes someone a citizen and what makes them essentially that nationality or what makes them feel at home in that country?) – how is she any less French than any other? And in America, the “melting pot of the world” as is so often falsely cited, how is a woman of Indian origin any less American than someone of Irish origin or of Japanese origin or any other origin?
Basic questions because they demand basic answers. This kind of discrimination is so patently stupid and hateful that I cannot bring myself to analyze it further. All I want to do is slap the people who are most vocally hateful and say, “Get a grip – this is the world you live in.” I long for a day when all people are so obviously mixed in terms of race and nation that things are never obviously cut and dry.
Very little in this world sounds more disgusting to me than eggnog. I don’t know if the “real” eggnog made from scratch would be any better (sounds like a concoction of all wrong/bad things – thick, cream, milky, yucky) but the idea of buying a pre-made, non-alcoholic version in a grocery store and (god forbid) drinking it … or making a latte out of it – sounds beyond hideous.
That said, I might this year try out an eggnog recipe. And then use some of it to make eggnog cookies. I know SOME people will like it – even if I loved cookies, I can’t see myself being one of them.
Probable eggnog recipe
4 eggs (separated); use the yolks and whites both – but separately
1/3 cup sugar + 1 tablespoon sugar
1 pint whole milk
1 cup heavy cream
3 ounces bourbon
1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
Beat egg yolks, gradually add the 1/3 cup sugar and beat until dissolved. Add the milk and cream, then the bourbon and nutmeg. Stir.
In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites to soft peak stage. Gradually add the tablespoon of sugar and beat until stiff peaks form.
Whisk the egg white and egg yolk mixtures together. Chill, serve in cups with a bit of freshly grated nutmeg on top.
Probable eggnog cookie recipe
1 1/4 cups white sugar
3/4 cup soft butter
1/2 cup eggnog (of course use some of the eggnog you made from the recipe above!)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 egg yolks
1 teaspoon nutmeg
2 1/4 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
Preheat oven to 300F and line pans with parchment paper. Combine dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, cinnamon and nutmeg) in one bowl. Cream sugar and butter until fluffy in another bowl. Add eggnog, vanilla and egg yolks. Beat until smooth. Add flour mixture and until just combined. Spoon small balls of dough onto parchment-lined baking sheets. Make them small because the dough spreads. Sprinkle lightly with nutmeg. Bake 15 to 18 minutes.
thumbprint cookies and a lot of dangerous tinfoil!
Long ago and far away when I lived in the enchanted land that is Iceland, full of bitchilized public workers/office clerks and the kind of otherworldly strong wind that could knock you on your ass (or face), I baked at least as much as I do now. I used to “entertain” (yes, the quotes are intentional and meaningful. I am not just putting quotation marks around a word the way I see people gratuitously do these days. That is, for example, in this case, if one put quotation marks around “entertain” you would assume that it is meant as a tongue-in-cheek, perhaps euphemistic term that really means something else. That’s how I mean it. But I often see people putting quotes around words when they do actually mean exactly what they are writing. And don’t get me started on the air quotes!) more back then – I was more centrally located and invited people over with relative frequency. I experimented a lot with cookie recipes, making candy and with ingredients in general (since I was taking many stabs in the dark at substituting materials and ingredients I could not find that figured heavily into my recipes). I experimented a lot in general. I suppose if my company were not sweet enough for people, they could turn to all the sugar-laced goods I put on offer.
a big table of baked stuff – long ago, holidays in Oslo
In baking, the “grunt work” (although all the work that goes into baking could be referred to as grunt work) is the part I really don’t like. What I mean by this is the rolling out dough, choosing cookie cutters and cutting and decorating the cookies. It’s for these reasons that I almost never make things like sugar cookies or anything else that requires rolling and cutting. But back in the old days (ha) in Iceland, I had a trusty assistant in my friend Sarah, who used to come over and do the grunt work and always produced something that was elevated to beauty thanks to her decorating efforts. I recently saw some photos of her decorating cookies with her daughter, and it made all these memories come flooding back.
And it was more than ten years ago! My time in Seltjarnarnes was fairly brief – between 2001 and 2003, and there were so many characters who passed through at that time. Most not particularly important or memorable but some who stick in my mind and heart even now despite the fact that, like most non-Icelanders who live in Iceland, they flew to the four winds – because most non-Icelanders don’t seem to plant permanent roots there. It certainly does make me reflect on the people who do, for whatever reason, cross our paths – how very random it can be, and yet sometimes so full of unexpected coincidences.
Next weekend, among the things I shall bake — an army of gingerbread men. They are soft soldiers, though. Not hard or ready for combat. Living in Scandinavia, as I do, I know that people really like their traditional pepparkakor/piparkökur – thin, crisp and not unlike a dog biscuit in its crunchy-last-forever qualities. But a thick, soft gingerbread man will get me every time.
I cannot trust the weather. I dress for the mess rather than dress for success.
I also think some barriers must be built and caution exerted any time someone announces (verbatim) that he is “not an asshole” and is “not insensitive”. If you’ve got to explicitly announce it, could it possibly have much meaning?
Thirdly, I propose that we all mistrust anything called an “email blast”. Generally these email blast marketing campaigns are … well, a specific kind of activity – but who announces that it is a “blast” externally? I received an email that was literally titled “Monthly Job Blast” or something similar, and by “blast”, we can be sure they were not referring to an explosion or a party. I don’t even like it when the dubious “email blast” is referred to in the workplace when we’re planning such a thing – so why on earth would I want people trying to market to me to do so?
I am not psychic. Evidence of this: Val Kilmer is still alive.
That said, I have some common sense (sometimes). I did not need to be psychic to know that I was going to have to take a longer route to work to ensure a safer route to work.
During the weekend, the weather turned to the typical cold, snowy Swedish winter one expects. Coming off a vacation and not really wanting to go back (I live about three hours by car from where I work and commute in on Monday mornings, leaving on Thursday afternoons), I envisioned the horrible road conditions on the road I normally take (a road I don’t like in ideal conditions). It winds and twists, is hilly, and wild animals, especially gigantic moose, pop out suddenly at every turn. In warm, decent weather, this is dangerous enough. In the middle of the night, at -7C with snow and ice covering the ground, a recipe for disaster. I also did not imagine that anyone cleared that highway – so I drove a good 100 kms out of my way so I could take Norwegian roads. You read that right. I crossed from Sweden into Norway, drove about 150 kms, and crossed back into Sweden to the south. Most of the drive, this way, was motorway that had been cleared and ultimately only tacked one hour onto the overall drive – although one hour is one hour. A train might have been doable but really not the best option this week.
Beyond that, “ice is evil” according to some dude named Doug.
And now, during my vacation, my work network password expired, so I can’t log in. Right now it is not important since I am sitting in the parking lot of the office waiting for it to open. Really need to rethink this nonsense.
A friend mentioned he had seen The Muppet Family Christmas for the first time and linked to it… and I was elated. I LOVE this special and had never been able to find it anywhere. Now I can get over the funk I’m in of having to return to work.
Best thing ever! Can anything compete with something that has Oscar the Grouch, The Count, Cookie Monster AND the Swedish Chef in it? (And all the rest of the Muppet, Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock gang?)
“No, I’ll be nicely miserable in my trash can here.”
I am going to make a bunch of cookie dough today and stick it in the freezer to bake next weekend. Time before the holidays is short. Must bake!
I am thinking about ways to give my 2014 the best possible chance for success, and more importantly, happiness and fulfillment. PLAY WITH BABY TIGERS! Build a treadmill desk! Knock down the superfluous upstairs walls! Fall in love with some lovely Parisian (even though s/he won’t have a Scottish accent!) and host next Thanksgiving in Paris! Go to more live shows – have more music in my life in general! Build my business up (either the web-based one or the bakery tank idea)! Find the perfect shade(s) of pink lipstick! (And I’m a sucker for the reds!) Learn more about wine! Finally take a real vacation somewhere far away that I often dream of! Get a Roomba! Take more walks in the forest, as gave me such joy two years ago! Enjoy every minute of being at home! When I worked at home, no matter how much I worked then, it always felt like I was on vacation – or at least that vacation did not matter. I was relaxed and organized. I miss that. I don’t know that all these things are possible, probable or even that they would contribute to elusive happiness. But they are fun ideas – it’s giving me some joy to think about it right now.
“And one day we will die and our ashes will fly
From the aeroplane over the sea
But for now we are young let us lay in the sun
And count every beautiful thing we can see
Love to be in the arms of all, I’m keepin’ here with me”
-Neutral Milk Hotel
More randomness…
A friend posted an article on her Facebook wall that encouraged a return to some old-fashioned dating practices. When I reposted the article on my own Facebook wall, I stated that I might not need all the old-fashioned stuff (“I want all that stupid old shit, like letters and sodas…” Liz Phair, “Fuck and Run”), but one of the points touched a nerve – that we should call what we’re doing by what it is. Calling dating/courting/a relationship “hanging out” is an act of clinging to a juvenile and awkward period of not knowing who you are or what you want. I am almost 40. I might not want, as the letter says, to define a relationship as “exclusive” or a “Greg Brady-going steady” thing, but I am not “hanging out”. I don’t know when the shift happened between steps progressing into a relationship to this casual, non-committal, “we’re hanging out” vibe (and yes, it does seem like a “vibe” more than something grounded in reality).
As I lament the winding down of my vacation, I watched a handful of movies – mostly not memorable. But it was entertaining to rewatch a few – I am not normally someone who watches the same movies over and over, but I decided to watch Wall Street again after… 20+ years. Charlie Sheen had a sliver of talent then, beautiful, hopeful, full of vitality – all flushed away long ago to give way to the troll/demon he seems to have become. I loved all the “high-tech gadgets” that look so laughable now – the briefcase-sized cell phones and the two-inch-screen portable tv. Let’s not overlook Daryl Hannah’s ridiculous wardrobe or the unthinkable way she decorated the Sheen character’s apartment. Oh, the 80s.
A few weeks ago, a few women in my office and I took our young Spanish intern to lunch for his birthday. The women and I are all in the late-30s age bracket; the intern was turning 24. On our walk to the restaurant, the intern was questioning me about how I manage to walk around outside without covering my legs or wearing a real coat – +5C is cold for him. I don’t “winterize” until -20C. I did explain that I don’t keep my house like an icebox, saying, “In my house, the heat is on.” My three similarly aged female colleagues and I, in unison, burst into song, as if on cue, “The heat is on… it’s on the street…” Way to date ourselves, relics of a bygone era! The intern had never heard the song, apparently, but when we got back to the office, he wanted a full education in 80s music and all things American because I am, in his words, “his American bible”. Hmm.
As if it were not abundantly clear already, I am one of those nerds who holds on to details. While my colleagues could not remember who performed “The Heat is On”, I could immediately “(dis)credit” Glenn Frey and rattle off his career history with The Eagles (who blighted – yes, I exaggerate – 70s music about as much as Frey and his Eagle partner-in-crime Don Henley inflicted their solo careers on 80s music). I suppose “The Heat is On” was only as popular as it was because it was also associated with the Beverly Hills Cop film franchise, which is also a quintessential part of 80s pop culture. While schooling this intern in 80s horrors for the ears, I also managed to share the dubious 80s songs/hits of Starship while also sharing the history of how they came about – rising from the ashes of the drug-addled remnants of other related 60s and 70s has-been bands, much like a lot of the stuff that filled the 80s music charts. All supposedly reformed (in both senses of the word) and “Just Say No” – HA. (Starship managed also to supply one of the worst songs, as well as churning out mediocrity for much of the decade – for one of the era’s worst movies – “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” from Mannequin – highlight of Andrew McCarthy or Kim Cattrall’s careers? Almost no 80s movie could have been complete without Andrew or James Spader, who was in both Mannequin and the aforementioned Wall Street. Both also figured prominently in the 80s classic, Less than Zero, which was also a very true-to-life vehicle for the then very messed up Robert Downey, Jr. And both McCarthy and Spader were in 80s teen favorite, Pretty in Pink – along with Jon Cryer – who has not done much other than that and, of course, the role of the aforementioned Charlie Sheen’s brother on the dismal and crass TV show, Two and a Half Men.)
Nothing can make someone feel old like imparting all this “popular culture” knowledge – when the “popular” culture her reference points are attached to were popular 20 or 30 years ago.
The same young intern came and said to me, “Did you know they had a war in Croatia not that long ago?” when we were talking about football (my beloved Iceland was playing Croatia for a chance to get into the World Cup at the time. They lost, but at least my Icelandic underdogs gave it a go). Yes, Croatia did have a war, young man, when you were in diapers and learning to walk. I was there (well, in Bosnia anyway) monitoring post-war elections.
I can forgive a young boy for not knowing “The Heat is On” – but a major war that took place in recent history within Europe…? God save the Spanish education system?!
Then again, that is what life is for – you do learn something new every day. Sometimes totally useless stuff. I, for example, learned that Liverpool named its airport after John Lennon. I sort of doubt Lennon would have liked that (not that I know what he would have liked). I wonder what Yoko thinks. (Yoko’s Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland somehow strikes me as something both of them would have approved of more than an international airport that seems to primarily take British tourists to get drunk and sunburned in Spain.)
Anyway, I started that tangent to say that I was watching movies. I rewatched Brokeback Mountain again – this is probably the third time I saw it, and I am still moved by Heath Ledger’s performance. Actually all the performances were outstanding, especially when contrasting it with Wall Street, which I watched immediately before. Even the secondary characters in Brokeback seem to have some depth and reality – you can feel for the wives of the two main characters. They are more than just one-dimensional props. The girlfriend and wife – all secondary characters – in Wall Street are hollow.
I went in an entirely different direction after that – watching Rêves de poussière, a film from Burkina Faso – the cinematography was beautiful, the story simple and arresting.
As the remaining minutes of vacation tick by, I do laundry, get middle-of-night, belligerent phone calls and wonder how a drunken person I have not seen in a decade or more (but have known now for 20 years) thinks he misses me. How do you miss someone you have not seen in more than ten years? Especially when that feeling has always been a one-way street. You don’t. You’re smoking nostalgia, you’re drinking a memory of something that never was. It’s imaginary.
“What a beautiful face I have found in this place
That is circling all ’round the sun and when we meet on a cloud
I’ll be laughing out loud, I’ll be laughing with everyone I see
Can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all”
“Mounds of human heads wander into the distance.
I dwindle among them. Nobody sees me. But in books
much loved, and in children’s games, I shall rise
from the dead to say the sun is shining!” –Osip Mandelstam
It has been, rather forgotten by me, more than ten years since I first read Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude. I recall finding the book in a 1 dollar pile of discards in a bookstore south of Seattle. Having read I Served the King of England in the summer of 1999, on the tail end of my first visits to the Czech Republic and the eastern and central Europe I had been reading and writing about from afar, it had always been a struggle to find this literature. The Czechs I had met to that point seemed hell-bent on a kind of chip-on-the-shoulder arrogance about their superior intelligence and artistry, possessing a tortured soul and an impossible language for anyone but them to understand. Guarding it closely – almost jealously – as though it would diminish what they had if anyone else could get a glimpse of the brilliance. I imagine this attitude being more a Cold War-era hangover than anything else. But I don’t know. My path, which at that moment in 1999, was still at least partly paved with stones from the Slavic studies academic arena, did not wind in that direction.
“‘How much more beautiful it must have been in the days when the only place a thought could make its mark was the human brain and anybody wanting to squelch ideas had to compact human heads, but even that wouldn’t have helped because real thoughts come from outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, INQUISITORS BURN BOOKS IN VAIN. If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh…‘”
In my recent rereading of Too Loud a Solitude, I discovered an Amazon.com “review” (I won’t really call it that so much as I will call it a collection of notes about things that struck me while reading the book) that I posted in 2003. I had forgotten the review, but there were little bits I had remembered from my previous reading.
For example, quotes, such as “It is from books that I’ve learned the heavens are not humane”. Or better yet, the narrator referring to his tale as a “portrait of the artist as an old mushroom face” (which recently took on even more immediacy when a friend described someone’s morning face as looking like a “used teabag”). Reading the book again, the same imagery jumped out at me – the art and its destruction mixed among garbage. The onslaught of technology, wiping out a way of life or a particular job. Or a theme we discuss at work sometimes – the destruction of beauty. One colleague, who lived for some time in Mexico, marveled at the hard work and skill that Mexican women put into creating the most elaborate piñatas – only to see them destroyed, beaten violently until the candy hidden inside exploded out onto the ground. Perfect analogies for the transitory and temporary nature of beauty. It is only here for a moment. The ‘hero’ of Too Loud a Solitude spent his life operating a wastepaper compactor and extracted the lesson that there is beauty in destruction.
Even current events seem to touch upon the timeliness of the message and imagery – for example, the conscientious (if strange) dumpster divers who go looking for treasures in the garbage because we live in the kind of society when people throw away insane amounts of perfectly good things – food, furniture, appliances. Our throwaway society with its millions of starving people (in the US for example) disposes of and destroys everything. It is no wonder we see people as disposably.
