It’s not telepathy, kiddo, it’s a series of tubes we call “The Internet”

SO SOME PEOPLE DECIDED NOT TO QUIT SMOKING TODAY. SOME PEOPLE ACTUALLY DECIDED TO BUY A WHOLE NEW PACKAGE OF TOBACCO THIS MORNING, MAKING THEIR PROMISES TO “QUIT SOON” SEEM ESPECIALLY FLIMSY. AMONG THESE PEOPLE IS AN INDIVIDUAL WHO EXPRESSED SOLIDARITY WITH MY KICK-ASS DETOX PLAN BUT NEVERTHELESS ALLOWED ME TO CONTINUE TAKING SUGAR CUBE AFTER SUGAR CUBE AFTER SUGAR CUBE DURING OUR TEATIME. A TEATIME THAT HAPPENED TO TAKE PLACE AT ONE OF THE BEST PLACES EVER FOR FALLING OFF THE NO-CARB WAGON AND ROLLING AROUND IN SOME REFINED SUGAR AND BUTTER WITH YOUR EYES GLAZED OVER AND TONGUE LOLLING IN UNADULTERATED JOY.

LET’S JUST SAY I KNOW WHO I’M NOT GOING TO ASK FOR HELP WHEN I NEED TO KICK MY METH HABIT.

God, that’s annoying. No way I can possibly keep it up, even for spite. I don’t know how Kanye can live with himself. Oh wait, yes I do. Who needs lowercase letters when you have piles and piles of cash to roll around in? Suckers, that’s who.

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Photo courtesy of the matchless M. Starik, who better get her butt back to Paris pronto.  We’re getting into all kinds of trouble without her calm Soviet wisdom to guide us.

La crise de foie

Since arriving in Paris I’ve jettisoned all of my crunchy California eating habits (quinoa! burly greens! tofu!) and become a veritable boozing, animal-fat consuming machine. Another bottle of wine? Of course!  Charcuterie for dinner? Yes please! Would you like a cheese plate? Don’t mind if I do! I decided to give myself carte blanche on the eating while I was here, cholesterol be damned. There are only so many times in one’s life when one can eat foie gras with reckless abandon, especially since the ban goes into effect in California in 2012. We can’t figure out how to save the public university system, provide health care to every citizen, or allow same-sex couples have basic legal rights and privileges regarding the people they love and share their lives with, but man, it’s the dawning of a new fucking day for ducks and geese on the West Coast!  I digress. Anyway, this self-granted “freebie” coupled with my scheme to remind A of all the best parts of Western civilization has resulted in my eating and drinking all kinds of wonderful, health-threatening delicacies like a fiend lately. I’ve been hitting it hard, friends, and honestly, I’m starting to feel it.

The French have this concept of crise de foie, which literally means “liver crisis.” I think it is technically meant to describe the sluggish feeling you get from having consumed too much fat. I take it to mean the sense I’ve been having for the past week or so that all my internal organs are raising the white flag and crying out “MERCY! HAVE PITY ON US! NO MORE BOOZE! NO MORE CHEESE! NO MORE SALAMI, BUTTER, AND CORNICHON SANDWICHES! FEED US KALE! DRINK SOME WATER FOR CHRISSAKES! TAKE A VITAMIN MORE OFTEN THAN ONCE A YEAR!” I think I’ve gotten especially bad about consuming too much white bread and refined sugar, which I’m sure Oprah has explained to you is the equivalent of committing a cell-holocaust. A tiny voice inside me protests “But the baguettes!  And the croissants!  So delicious!” But that voice is getting fainter, because it is literally too weak from malnutrition to lift its head to speak.

Seriously, is it possible to get scurvy with a modern diet? What if that modern diet is almost entirely devoid of vegetables and fruits? Does pesto count as a vegetable? What about pickles?

The madness stops tomorrow. It’s time for a detox. I’m going to be as disciplined as Gwyneth fricking Paltrow this week. I actually consulted her website when looking for detox ideas and wrote down some recipes for cold green vegetable soups. Before I can report back on the GOOP phenomenon, I’ll have to stop puking in my own mouth. Obviously, this won’t be any crazy Master Cleanse. I got out of Orange County before I started subscribing to that sort of lunacy. But I am going to stop eating all refined sugar, white bread, alcohol, meat, and cheese for a while. I know that doesn’t sound like a big deal to all of you intelligent adults out there who are able to practice super-mature things like moderation, but again:  SALAMI, BUTTER, AND CORNICHON SANDWICHES! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT A GREAT COMBO THAT IS?! I suspect I’m going to be cranky as hell, so I apologize in advance for any rants I may or may not post this week. Black coffee and Morbier-withdrawal will do that to a girl. Tomorrow, over a meal of green tea and raw spinach, I’m going to convince my friend B that THIS IS THE WEEK HE NEEDS TO QUIT SMOKING. That way, we can be cranky together as our bodies slowly heal from the havoc we have wreaked upon them. HEAR THAT B? SOUND LIKE A PLAN? IF IT DOESN’T, THEN I MIGHT CONTINUE TO WRITE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS UNTIL YOU AGREE! LOOK, THE LIVER CRISIS HAS TURNED ME INTO KANYE WEST! HELP!

To restore silence is the role of objects

First of all, if commenting is any sign of collective resonance, I should write about high school reunions all the time. My friend BJG, inspired in part by my incoherent ramblings about the past decade, posted a knockout ode to the great love of his high school life:  Lauryn Hill circa 1998-9. He distills something pitch-perfect about his affection for Hill, namely its stuckness in a particular album, a particular mood, and a particular moment in time both in her career and in his own life.  I was thinking about this the other day when A and I got to talking about our first concert experiences and I tried to explain how much seeing Bush had meant to me when I was young. A is a few years older than me and responded with a typical revulsion to my declaration of youthful love of Gavin Rossdale. The standard response to such a declaration is to denounce the band as faux-grunge and to reassert one’s allegiance to and fandom of Nirvana. I forgive it in A and some of my other friends that actually are of the age to have had some semblance of pop-culture consciousness of the Seattle grunge scene. But when somebody who graduated from high school in 2000 in an upper-middle class American suburb tells me how their about their deep and abiding love of Nirvana prevented them from ever really getting into Bush, I feel a strong desire to call bullshit. I was nine when Nevermind came out, and so were they. Maybe there were a lot of extremely pop-culture savvy nine-year-olds scampering about in ‘91 and I was just deaf to their noise, but I highly doubt it. I can’t speak for someone born in ’78 or ’84. But I can say, pretty unequivocally, that if you were born in ’81 or ’82, there was a moment sometime in your adolescence in which you thought that “Machinehead” was the coolest fucking song you had ever heard. You also probably owned Dookie and thought of it as a punk album. It’s okay. Don’t panic. It was the suburbs, you were only twelve, and there were plenty of years left for you to get into The Clash and forget all about those early transgressions.

I’m surprised that some people are reticent to own these kinds of identifications, especially because they seemed so definitional of our social consciousness when they occurred. Bush—and by this I actually mean Gavin Rossdale—laid down the tropes for my romantic life to such an absurd degree that having a guitar and a greasy mat of hair were near-prerequisites for dating me in high school. Gavin was the perfect guy:  foreign (but not in an alienating way), talented, brooding, and volatile. He was always liable to punch through a door or get into a fight, but this was because he was passionate and damaged, probably by something in his past that was tragic and difficult and largely incomprehensible to a nice girl like yourself. Gavin would break your heart if you were actually available (Gavin wasn’t into available) but when things fell apart he would write you a song to try and win you back. The song he would write you would suggest that your adolescent connection with one another was singular, transcendent, and pure, and you would believe it with your whole heart. Or at least I did. One of the things I truly mourn as an adult is that kind of radical self-effacing emotional investment in an object. Yes, those early objects are always just a cipher, but despite this we never manage to cathect as acutely again, even though as a consolation prize the objects of our affection gain flesh and blood.

To wit, nothing on television or film has ever left the kind of psychical mark on me as did the following video. I was engaged in the perverse coming-of-age activity of watching MTV Spring Break and wondering what the bloom of my own youth would look like. It was 1996, and he kept playing in spite of the rain. I never made it to Cancun, but I can still say that there is nothing better than this:

Oh, Audrey

My friend O is in town for a few days to review the new production of Ibsen’s “Maison de Poupée” (“A Doll’s House”) at the Théâtre de la Madeleine, starring none other than Audrey Tautou.  It pays to have friends with interesting jobs, especially when they need a hot date for the theater.  While O, an Ibsen scholar of substantial insight, had gotten me amped for the unusual take on Ibsen’s play that were were surely to witness, I’ll readily admit that my interest in the spectacle largely stemmed from my desire to see Tautou in person.  It is difficult for a certain kind of American to construct a mental composite of a cool French girl without consulting the tropes laid down by Amélie.  Just to get it out of the way: Yes, she is absolutely as gorgeous and tiny and sylvan as you have suspected.  Probably more so.  It’s much more than the haircut. She looks like she is made of porcelain.

The Théâtre de la Madeleine is a tiny, mid-1920s structure that allows for a really intimate encounter with the stage.  As for the production of “Maison” itself, I thought it was terrific.  I’ve been pretty honest here about what a philistine I am when it comes to the theater, but Michael Fau’s vision of the play was funnier, more melodramatic, and more riveting than other productions of Ibsen I have seen.  Tautou’s Nora was a mass of frenetic, manic energy, and the racing clip of her anxiety made the climax of the play more psychologically intelligible than I’ve ever seen it handled before.  It wasn’t everyone’s cup of (boring) Ibsen tea–the two men next to us threw up their hands in the second act, audibly muttered “Putain!”, and exited the theater.  But if you are interested in seeing a radically different, anti-realist take on Ibsen, I would really recommend that you try and snag a ticket to this production.   When O’s (much more articulate and insightful) review comes out in the Ibsen journal she is writing for, I’ll try and post it here.

Photos via Théâtre de la Madeleine

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.