Category: dear reader

Clarence in Berlin: Brunch

There has suddenly been a ton of Google searches concerning Salò arriving at this here blarg.  B conjectured that this was because it was Sunday, and Acattone screens Salò on Sunday nights, so maybe people were just looking for the showtime?   I feel like I really haven’t written nearly enough about Salò to warrant this interest, though I wish I had.  Dearest reader who is interested in Salò, have you read any Leo Bersani?  I think his “Merde Alors,” published in October in the summer of 1980, is the best thing anybody has ever written about Salò. Like, ever.  I’d link to it on Jstor, but you might not be a terminal student like myself with an academic subscription.  If you e-mail me, however, I’ll be happy to send you a PDF.

Here’s a teaser:

Narrativity sustains the glamour of historical violence.  Narratives create violence as an isolated, identifiable topic or subject.  We have all been trained to locate violence historically—that is, as a certain type of eruption against a background of generally nonviolent human experience.  From this perspective, violence can be accounted for through historical accounts of the circumstances in which it occurs.  Violence is thus reduced to the level of plot; it can be isolated, understood, perhaps mastered and eliminated.  Having been conditioned to think of violence within narrative frameworks, we expect this mastery to take place as a result of the pacifying power of such narrative conventions as beginnings, explanatory middles, and climatic endings, and we are therefore suspicious of works of art which reject those conventions.  In short, we tend to sequester violence; we immobilize and centralize both historical acts of violence and their aesthetic representations.  A major trouble with this is that the immobilization of a violent event invites a pleasurable identification with its enactment.  A coherent narrative depends on stabilized image; stabilized images stimulate the mimetic impulse.  Centrality, the privileged foreground, and the suspenseful expectation of climaxes all contribute to a fascination with violent events on the part of readers and spectators.  As Sade spectacularly illustrates, the privileging of the subject of violence encourages a mimetic excitement focuses on the very scene of violence.  All critiques of violence, to the extent that they conceive of it in terms of scenes which can be privileged, may therefore promote the very explosions which they are designed to expose or forestall. (28-9)

B just pointed out that I’m probably soliciting contact from a really fucked-up person.  But there are just so few of us out there, yanno?

You know how Jim Gaffigan does that thing where he mimics the interior monologue of his audience members?  I suspect that my reader’s interior monologue sounds something like this right now:

Oh my god, stop talking about that stupid movie.  Nobody cares about Pasolini!  We didn’t sign up for some academic blog!  We want to hear about brunch in Berlin!

Oh, all right, twist my arm.

* * *

I feel like waxing on about how much I love brunch will probably topple this blarg into such unabashedly bourgeois bohemian territory that the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste will never accept my application.  To be fair, my primary interest in being a member of the NPA stems from their most excellent graphic design, so my motives are already highly suspect as far as they are concerned.  But anyway, here we go: I love brunch.  You kinda knew that already, didn’t you?  Any activity that involves sleeping in, boozing during the day, sitting outside in the sunshine, talking shit with my friends, and eating things doused in Hollandaise was likely to be my bag.  And I’ll make a controversial argument here and now:  Berlin is the best city in the world for brunching.  Now I know all you New Yorkers are getting your underwear in a wad right now, but hear me out.  I’ll concede that New Yorkers understand brunch and have institutionalized brunch in a way that I totally love.  Los Angelenos don’t understand brunch.  It involves too much laziness and not enough striving-to-be-famous.  Everybody at brunch in LA is always just stopping through on their way to an audition or Bikram yoga class.  Steve Martin got it right, brunch in LA is always something like this:

So New York beats LA on this one, hands down, but New York brunches are expensive, or at least compared to Berlin.  Now Paris brunches make New York brunches look like Denny’s.  My neighborhood is full of 28 euro brunch buffets, and that doesn’t include coffee.  I think that is about eighty-seven dollars at current conversion rates.  I don’t care what you say, it’s still funny, even if the euro is tanking under a huge cloud of volcanic ash.

Berlin brunches are on Sunday are cheap, lazily paced, and often are an all-you-can-eat buffet.  My two favorite buffet brunches in Berlin are at Bellaluna (Kollwitzstraße 66, U-Bahn Senefelderplatz) in Prenzlauer Berg and Café do Brasil (Mehringdamm 72, U-Bahn Mehringdamm) in Kreuzberg. At both you can eat yourself stupid on delicious things for less than 10 euro (at Café do Brasil, this includes all the coffee you can drink).  And don’t you dare think that this is some kind of Country Buffet operation.  We’re talking beautiful spreads of pastries, fruit, cheese, charcuterie, and smoked fish.  At Belluna—which also makes killer pizza the rest of the week—you can also expect to see a variety of pasta dishes.  One day there was a cold seafood salad of calamari, shrimp, clams, and mussels in pesto.  I almost died.  If you are sick to death of European food, Café do Brasil adds amazing Brazilian-style meats to the standard mix.  The best advice I can give you for any delicious Berlin brunch locale is to arrive early and to be prepared to wait.  This city takes brunch seriously.

My trip to Berlin didn’t involve a Sunday brunch, much to my chagrin.  My amazing hostess D made it up to me, however, by suggesting on our first day that we stroll around darling, bobo Prenzlauer Berg and have brunch at my ever-after favorite, Anna Blume (Kollwitzstraße 83, U-Bahn Eberswalder Straße).  Named for one of my favorite Dada poems by Kurt Schwitters, Anna Blume is a combination cake bakery, flower shop, and heavenly restaurant.  They have rosemary honey ice cream here, people.  There are fleece blankets on their abundant outdoor seating, so if it’s chilly you can wrap yourself up.  And the breakfast towers, oh, the breakfast towers!  Three tiers of cheese, charcuterie, scrambled eggs, homemade gravlax, roasted vegetables, fresh fruit, seasonal preserves, pastries, and baskets of fresh bread.  I suspect I’d even feel warm and friendly breaking bread with Glenn Beck if there was an Anna Blume breakfast tower between us.  If you don’t go for a breakfast tower, can I just recommend that you try the Anemone plate?  The aforementioned gravlax-of-pure-unadulterated-bliss is paired with a heap of sweet, tiny shrimp in a cream sauce, pickled onions and gherkins, some kind of whipped creamy cheese concoction, warm slices of dark pumpernickel bread, scrambled eggs, fresh fruit, salad, and strawberry preserves.  Or you can try the Oleander plate, with it’s heaps of Italian charcuterie, bufala mozzerella, and roasted vegetables.  Or perhaps you are like my friend D, who is seven months pregnant with a iron-hungry little carnivore.  She looked positively rapturous over her meat-laden Alpenrose plate, which boasts some tiroler schinken worthy of your unborn child. Whichever way you go, it will be perfect and under 8 euros.  You’ll have to go to Berlin and get one yourself.  I’ll be in Paris, hemorrhaging cash and dreaming of that smoked salmon.

Tomorrow, Clarence will let you in on his favorite French, Vietnamese, Indian, and (gasp!) Mexican eats in Berlin.  Suspend your disbelief!

Clarence in Paris: Rouammit and Huong Lan

So, I’ll admit, being contacted by luckygal90 with a cease-and-desist of sorts was a minor thrill. I’d liken it to the first time that I prank called someone and they *69ed me. I doubt that this will actually turn into anything, as I’m sure she has long since forgotten about my six readers and me. She’s probably way too amped about the fact that her video has indeed gone viral, garnering some thirty thousand hits since I originally wrote about it yesterday. I’m pretty jealous. What are you saying internets? That my posts about falafel, John Mayer, and my sex dreams about dead modernists aren’t worth 32,000 hits? Interestingly enough, yesterday was a record-topping day for me in terms of web traffic.  Unfortunately, most of those hits came from people googling “luckygal90,” which is kinda like the universe punching me in the teeth for being too smug.

Anyway, now that I’ve dipped one toe in the sludgebucket that is political blogging I’m going to quickly remove it and begin writing about food again.  I started out trying to express my genuine optimism that we will pull through this partisan nightmare and ended up bullying a 13-year-old girl.  I don’t have the stomach for it.  While I’ll hang on to a conflict like a dog worrying a dead animal, I’m not really one for actual confrontation.  I’m much more into complacently talking about people behind their backs.

Also, there’s this:

That’s right people.  It’s spring in Paris.  While other cities may indeed try to make a case for their singular awesomeness during other seasons (I remember New York in the fall to be quite lovely, and Denver winters are dreamy bar none), Paris in the springtime is pretty unfuckwithable.  I hear people have even written songs about it.  Suddenly everyone in this city is beautiful and smiling and sitting in a sunny park.  Lovers are canoodling by the Seine, children are playing, women are wearing beautiful beige trenchcoats and flowery scarves, and there are tulips and green plums in the market.  I’m not going to keep antagonizing a child living somewhere in rural America because, well, there’s such nicer things to do right now.  Shoulda come at me in January, kiddo.

* * *

Rouammit and Huong Lan

103 avenue d’Ivry, 75013 Paris

Métro:  Tolbiac

So I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while:

Yes, that’s duck.  Perfect, tender, lacquered duck in a spicy broth with braised bok choy, red chiles, and crispy deep-fried mint leaves.  I’ve been fantasizing about it since I didn’t order it two weeks ago when the genetically over-endowed S & H introduced us to Rouammit and Huong Lan—a yummy pair of Laotian restaurants in the 13th.  My buddy from California, BC (sorry, dude, B is taken), was staying with me for a few days and we puzzled over the idea of Laotian food for quite a while.  After a Wikipedia search, we settled on the idea that it was probably like Thai.  And it is, if you associate Thai with flavors like chile, peanuts, lemongrass, fish sauce, coconut milk, and green garlic.  But where many of the Thai restaurants in Paris tend to be kinda swish, the Laotian food here is hearty, cheap, and unfussy.  Rouammit and Huong Lan are just that perfect combination.

On my first visit, I ordered the first thing on the menu – Khao Pun Nam Pa, a soup of rice noodles in a fish and coconut milk broth.  It’s served with a plate of vegetables that you dunk in the spicy, salty, creamy soup, and their crunchiness nicely offsets the tender succulent fish chunks.  It’s really good, and would be amazing if you were sick.  But unfortunately I was sitting across from S, the veteran who wisely ordered the Pet Yang Lad Prik (pictured above).  I spent most of the meal being overcome with envy.  I hate it when I don’t order the best thing. You see, if I was forced to list the top ten things that I love about France, this country’s rabid consumption of duck and rabbit might find its way to the top of the list.  Duck, which you rarely see outside of lousy Chinese restaurants and high-end menus in the United States, is ubiquitous here, and usually much better.  The duck at Rouammit and Huong Lan is exceptionally delicious and works perfectly in tandem with their spicy sauces. BC sampled their duck with coconut red curry, called Kheng Phed Pet and it was really lovely.  But it was S’s lacquered duck with bok choy that I really burned for.

[Autobiographical aside: I was once told by an ex-boyfriend (after much introspection) that the animal I most resembled in character was a duck. I was totally crushed, as I was hoping for a bit more glamorous spirit animal. In retrospect, this game was pretty skewed towards his own egotistical gratification. When I asked what his spirit animal was, he responded that he was “a wolf or maybe a shark.” The “lone wolf” reference certainly wasn’t lost on me, but I wasn’t sure about how the shark might fit in to the veiled conversation we were obviously having about his fear of commitment. Then I remembered that if sharks if stop swimming for even an instant, they die. Man, can I pick ‘em or what? Anyway, apparently I’m fond of eating my spirit animal. I don’t really remember that part of Totem and Taboo.]

So last night, under the auspices of “blog research,” I drug poor M back to Rouammit and Huong Lan.  I pretended to let her look at the menu, but she never had a chance.  I was bound and determined to have that duck and to also sample the rave-worthy Phad Thai.  I think she knew that she was merely a cog in the vast machine of my scheme.  She’s an excellent sport (and perhaps this blog’s biggest fan), so she let me have what I wanted.  It was delicious.  Perhaps best of all, the bill was yet again incredibly reasonable.  Virtually none of the plates are more than 10 euro, making some experimentation practically a necessity.  I saw a heavenly-looking salad pass our table, which I think suspect is the Lap Neua, a spicy concoction of cold veggies, tripe, and beef.  I also lusted after passing plates of  Khao Nom Kroc, artfully arranged shrimp dumplings, and chili-oil spiked mango slices (didn’t write down the name of those).  Let’s just say I’ll be going back.

Details: It’s cheap, delicious, and the staff is unflaggingly friendly.  It’s also crazy-popular.  Get there any later than 7 p.m. for dinner and expect a serious wait time in the street.  Probably not best for bigger parties, though we managed to get a table for six by arriving early. Open 12-3 p.m. for lunch and 7-11 p.m. for dinner Tuesday through Friday, 12-4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.  Closed Mondays.

In isolation, he would examine himself in the Crowd-mood

I like it very much when the comments on my posts end up being much more detailed and much better wrought than my own writing.  It makes this whole thing seem slightly less malignant in its narcissism.  Lately, I’m totally unworthy of my commenters.  I would really encourage you to read both BJG and B’s comments on my last post, and would especially encourage you to watch the video that BJG links to on Youtube. I’m completely riveted by this child, and totally guilty of helping this little Neocon nightmare go viral.  We have a new poster child for the movement, ladies and gentlemen!  I suppose that this pettiness isn’t actually in keeping with B’s wise declaration that we not “continue to label them misfits in order to feel better about our own brand of elitism”  by going “back to a more human and humanizing form of discussion.”  But B, this one is just too damn good!  I especially love the sign at 0:17:  “Thank you Fox-News for keeping us infromed!”  Everyone, let’s help luckygal90 achieve her dreams, which she ever-so-articulately describes thusly:  “Every 1 I Really want Glenn Beck to see this so plz help me 2 get this video viral so he see’s it and i can mabie be on his AWESOME show !”

No mabies about it, kiddo, you’re gonna be huge!  Infrom your friends!

* * *

I wish I had an awesome restaurant to tell you about, but unfortunately I’ve been mostly housebound by a nasty head cold the past few days.  The past forty-eight hours have largely consisted of me lying in bed watching the second season of Twin Peaks and dealing with the torrents of snot.  How exactly I managed to miss Twin Peaks until now bewilders me, but now that I’m watching it I’m a veritable junkie.  I’ll spare you any half-baked analysis of the show as it would be a decade late and a dollar short, suffice it to say that I’m finding Lynch to be good entertainment when viewed through a serious Nyquil haze.

When I’m hopped up on Dayquil, I’ve been reading biographies of D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis.  Call it dissertation reading lite. I’ve never been a biography reader before this, though I can now see the appeal of the genre.  It is very satisfyingly intrusive to have this much intimate information about someone. Jeffrey Meyers, who wrote the Lawrence biography that I’m reading, seems positively infatuated by Lawrence’s sex life, specifically various ladies’ accounts of his virility and performance in the sack.  After one such exhaustive account of Lawrence’s ability to “come back to a woman time after time,” I felt compelled to draw a heart in the margin containing J.M. + D.H.L. 4EVR! This might be the result of repeated viewings of luckygal90’s groundbreaking video.  Or maybe just all the cold medication.  Don’t get me wrong, David Herbert (at least in Meyer’s account) sounds like just the type of vaguely sociopathic fellow that I myself could lose a lot of sleep over:

“Lawrence was an immensely attractive man, but lacked the traditional English aloofness and reserve.  Spontaneous and volatile, he put a great strain on his personal relationships.  He had an uncanny ability to pierce his friends’ social façade, penetrate the essence of their character and reveal their inner core.  He wanted to transform their lives, often a disturbing and unwelcome process, and the ability to withstand this onslaught was a prerequisite for retaining his friendship.  Lawrence spoke and wrote to his friends with unusual—and even cruel—candor in order to destroy their defenses and revitalize their existence.”

– D. H. Lawrence:  A Biography (1990)

Meyers seems especially adept at describing the particular strain of masochism that us mere mortals endure when confronted with Artistic Genius, that is, the battle cry of girls-who-date-musicians everywhere.  He’s mean to me because he wants to transform me!  He’s not a jerk, he’s an Artist!  If I withstand his bullshit, I’ll be the better for it!

Anyway, I suspect that all biographers—and perhaps dissertation-writers—run the risk of falling in love with their subjects.  I fell asleep mooning over a picture of old Wyndham when he was a dashing young solider and proceeded to have this overblown romance novel of a dream in which Wyndham and I were lovers torn apart by the war.  I awoke overwhelmed by the weight of my own lurid dorkiness.

* * *

I have taken my last dose of my smuggled-in American Nyquil (!), so I’ll let Wyndham have the last word.  I think he certainly had us Coastal Elites in mind when he wrote the following:

“You need the anger of the shopkeeper as much as the opinion, or the imagination, of the commissionaire.  It is because you are fundamentally like, as like as two peas to, your less informed, less polished brother, that you have a need of him.  You need to be seen by him, to keep close to or far from him.  You are always a pea disguising itself from a million other peas.  The other peas all know you are a pea, and love to think of a pea like themselves being a soft, subtle, clever, insolent pea!  But your identity is precarious.  Yes, you must be lavish; otherwise—you will receive that deadly look that one pea gives another when pretence is laid aside.  You must furthermore be careful never to touch, mingle with, or attack anything before first convincing yourself that it be, in fact, a pea.  Do not be so fatuous as to interfere with a melon!  it might not result in harm, but it is no fun!  The whole game is constructed, all its rules made, for bodies roughly speaking, identical in volume and potentialities.”

– Blasting and Bombardiering (1937)

UPDATE:  Luckygal90 apparently does not appreciate my publicizing her Youtube video to my six readers.  Too bad, we were only trying to do our small part in helping her achieve her dreams of going viral.  Nevertheless, I’ve removed the link at her request.

She divined a very tough self-preservative instinct behind the promises, pity, and ten-pound note.

On Friday night I went to a most excellent concert at Café de la Danse, which you should definitely check out if you are a Paris inhabitant. Can I just say how much I appreciate this thing of sitting down at concerts? I’ll confess, despite the fact that I really enjoy live music, I’ve been feeling kind of old and cranky at concerts for the past few years. I get tired of standing around forever waiting for the band to start, only so some guy who is three feet taller than me can suddenly push his way into the tiny pocket of space directly in front of me the minute the band starts playing. He’s usually a nice enough guy, a friendly, corn-fed, rosy-cheeked, baseball-cap guy, and he often turns around and says “oh, can you see?” and I always say “yeah, totally” because I’m terrified of confrontations. When I was sixteen this shit didn’t bother me. I wore high heels and danced until my feet bled and would have happily ignored the tall guy or the smelly guy or the chain of girls that push their way to the front and spill your beer in the process. Because that was all part of the concert-going experience, you know? Now I feel like a cranky old crow when I go to shows. I wear flats and I complain about the cost of drinks at concert venues and I get tired of standing and I end up spending a lot of my time resenting the people around me for various height, hygiene, and personal space infractions. I maxed out last summer when my friends and I attended a huge, two-day, outdoor music festival and it rained nonstop. As I shivered under my six-dollar poncho, drinking a partially spilled ten-dollar beer, the refrain that echoed in my head came not from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Of Montreal, or The Walkmen. The refrain came from my own damn superego, and it went something like:

You’re too damn old for this, oooh.

You’re too damn old for this, oooh.

Who do you think you are, you old loon?

You’re too damn old for this, oooh.

Pretend that this is a Pynchon novel and that you are already familiar with the melody.

At first I thought this sitting down thing was a merely a lovely anomaly when M and I went to see Stars Like Fleas at the Pompidou and everyone just sat and quietly swayed to the music. It seemed so damn civilized and pleasant, completely unlike concert going in the States. But the glorious Bosque Brown / Clare and the Reasons show we attended at Café de la Danse on Friday night confirmed my hopes. As we filed into the theatre, we discovered rows of elevated seating. You could put down your coat and purse! Everyone could see the band! Perhaps as a result of such creature comforts, the people attending the show were in their thirties, and forties, and fifties! Beer and wine were 4 euros! The bathrooms were clean! This is concert going for grownups! France: 1, United States: 0.

And let’s be honest, I’m not going to Fugazi shows anymore. I’m seeing bands that are mainly conducive to swaying and the occasionally foot-tap. Both Bosque Brown and Clare and the Reasons are such bands, in the best possible way. Mara Lee Miller and Clare Muldaur are for my money some of the most talented, idiosyncratic ladies singing today. In the imaginary universe where I am a tastemaker, I would instruct you to immediately fill your iPod immediately with their magic.

The concert was the climax of an evening where I renewed my deep and abiding love of M. I had wavered on whether or not I wanted to go to the show, and she pushed the envelope by texting me from the venue in the early evening and telling me to get my ass over there. We explored the area around rue de Charonne near Bastille before the show. It is essentially hipster paradise with tons of little bars and restaurants and glorious shops full of expensive things you don’t need. She had already cased the joint, so to speak, and found an adorable bar where we could try my newest obsession: Aperol Sodas.

I’ve been a longtime devotee of Campari-based cocktails. It’s such a gorgeous, interesting drink. There is nothing more aesthetically pleasing than a bottle of Campari. The graphic design is perfect. The alcohol itself makes everything look so girly, like a Shirley Temple, but it packs a pretty serious punch, especially in tandem with other hard liquor. I would say that Negronis (equal parts Campari, gin, and sweet vermouth, shaken with ice) are probably my favorite cocktail when I’m not messing around. But Campari also makes for an easy summer drink when paired with grapefruit juice, orange juice, or soda. One of my favorite memories of a summer trip to Vienna is sitting on the banks of Danube at one of those “beach” bars (I love that Europeans drag in a bunch of sand every year to simulate beach-going) with my mother, drinking Campari and orange juice and watching the sun set as our toes squirmed in the cool sand. Campari–along with nautical stripes, red lipstick, and well-made leather sandals–always makes me feel like part of a decaying Italian aristocracy. On Mad Men, Don Draper has a mid-life crisis and runs away to Palm Springs to stay with these itinerant, louche European “artists” in this spectacular mid-century mansion. As they have sex and discuss existentialism by the pool, guess what they are drinking, straight out of the bottle? Campari. Talk about pitch-perfect.

When I discovered last summer that Campari made sodas in adorable, miniature bottles, I nearly died of happiness. I wasn’t quite so jazzed to discover that a four pack of such delight costs ten dollars in Denver. Get with the program, Denver. In Europe, however, Campari soda is cheaper than Coke. I had noticed Aperol next to the Campari, but I thought that Aperol was merely a second-rate Campari knock-off. Uh, no, stupid girl. Actually both liquors are owned by the Campari company. Aperol is a lighter, sweeter herbal elixir with the distinct taste of—wait for it—rhubarb! Rhubarb is probably my favorite thing in the universe. So I’ve been on the hunt for Aperol sodas, which aren’t quite as ubiquitous as Campari sodas. The verdict from Friday night:  amazing. Sweet, effervescent, and the prettiest shade of pinky-orange you can imagine. M and I forecasted many warm evenings to come where we will sit in rue de Charonne cafes and sip Aperol soda and chat about all kinds of fallen-aristocrat topics.

Anyway, if we dwelled in that magical parallel universe where I am a tastemaker, I would tell you to stock up on some Campari or Aperol sodas for the summer. You’ll be the coolest kid on the block (that is, an imaginary block in the imaginary parallel universe where I am a tastemaker). I would also encourage you to start experimenting with Cynar, an artichoke (!) based liquor and the redheaded stepchild of the Campari family. I’ve been desperately wanting to buy a bottle, but I’m apprehensive about what I’ll make with it. I’ve heard that one can make a kind of Cynar-Negroni (substituting Cynar for Campari), but I love the citrusey kick of Campari in a Negroni and am loathe to give it up. So I’m desperately seeking suggestions from the cocktail-savvy reader. I’ll send you a sweet postcard in exchange for viable Cynar cocktail recipes. Or I’ll make you a drink (or three) if you’re a local. I feel like we already have a lot in common if you are experimenting with Cynar and happen to live in Paris.  Are you going to the Rouch/Artaud/Tarahumaras documentaries tomorrow?  Wanna date?

* * *

I haven’t been blogging with nearly the ferocity with which I began. Anyone who knows me can attest to my intensity right of the starting gate followed my lackluster enthusiasm a couple of laps into the race. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Sagittarius, what can I say? I have a list of good excuses, including a head cold, a houseguest, and an amazing documentary film festival that is only two blocks from my house. But excuses (and those individuals who make a habit of making them) suck and the last thing I want to do is abandon this silly little project. I’m so, so grateful that you are still stopping by. There are good things in the works for the month of April. I’m taking Clarence to Berlin and Brussels, so there will be lots of adjective-heavy reviews forthcoming of currywurst stands and steaming bowls of mussels. Stay tuned.

Did I mention how handsome you look today? You’re a knockout. Let’s get a Cynar-based drink. I think we’re totally ready to move to second base.

Can’t you take a joke?

All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we chose to distort it.

–Deconstructing Harry

My last relationship started to fall apart over what I initially thought was a minor miscommunication. I had written something pithy and sarcastic, which he read as passive aggressive, and somehow the whole thing turned into this enormous fiasco. We’re talking knock-down, drag-out misery for days on end. Even when I begged for a pass, an acknowledgement that my intentions were good even if his reading of them was not, he still couldn’t let go of the implications of a literal reading of my e-mail. I should have seen the thing for the red flag it was. Obviously, he and I had radically different ways of communicating. I’m hyperbolic and sarcastic most of the time.  The last thing I need in my life is someone too literal-minded.  Everyone who likes me tolerates my constant exaggeration and distortion of events.

I tell you this because some people have commented that the picture at the top of my blog had changed from the photo of graffiti reading “fuck this world” to the more prosaic (ha!) image you now see of English bear-baiting. Several people had suggested that the original image might be offputting to new readers.  While I’ll readily take suggestions (unabashed reader monger!), I do want to say that the entire “fuck this world” photo is really fantastic.  My friend A (another one – this pseudo-anonymous acronym plan is getting problematic, as I seem to have an inordinate amount of friends whose names begin with A, B, M, and S) and I happened upon that graffiti during our time together in Berlin.  The whole photo consists of me standing beneath the graffiti, appearing to be blithely unaware of its presence while I read my Lonely Planet Berlin guidebook.  We thought that was hi-larious.  In fact, I thought it was so funny that I made my mom repeat the basic premise when we happened upon some similar graffiti in Vienna.  This time, someone had scratched out “Kill a racist, just for fun!” on an electrical panel and I posed next to it, carefully reading my Lonely Planet Vienna guidebook.  Get it?!  Because I’m an oblivious tourist!

Obviously, I might just have a sick sense of what it means to “tone things down” a bit.  I discovered the current image of bear-baiting on a blog about the history of pit-bulls. Can we just talk for a moment about what a terrific metaphor bear-baiting is for this little blog? Bear-baiting as a sport was a serious attraction in England from the 16th through the 19th century.  The main bear-garden in London was called (drumroll please) the Paris Garden (!) at Southwark.  A bear-garden is a large circular pit surrounded by seating. In the center, a bear is chained either by its leg or its neck, and ferocious dogs are set upon it in waves. Some sport! Sometimes they would switch it up and bait different animals, including one occasion where they baited a pony with an ape tied to its back. The Puritans rightly wanted to see an end to the barbarity of bear-baiting, but it took nearly three hundred years of protest to formally ban the sport in England. While bear-baiting has been banned in the UK for nearly a century and is prohibited in most US states where bears live, it is still a popular sport in the Punjab and Sindh provinces of Pakistan. There isn’t much a linguistic residue of the practice in English, but my boyfriend Wikipedia tells me that “because the practice is time consuming and disrupts a person’s daily schedule, the term ‘bear baiting’ is sometimes used in Alaska to mean ‘screwing around.’” Beyond the obvious spatial concordances between a bear-garden and a blog where somebody writes about puking in public, don’t you love the idea of some Alaskan being like “That blogger girl has way too much time on her hands for bear baiting!”

Anyway, I just wanted to tell you it’s just a metaphor, dear reader, and we in no way condone animal cruelty here at Keeping the Bear Garden in the Background. We do rather unapologetically eat a lot of animals around here, but we have nothing but fond feelings towards bears in general.