Summer style

STOP THE PRESSES.  I just bought the most flattering, awesome, sexy, flirty bathing suit ever!  Yes, I have a *bit* of a bathing suit buying problem.  I have like, a million bikinis.  But what is a 30-something year old supposed to do when you're taking your kid to the pool and you don't want to be hot to trot, letting it all hang out?  You get a retro, 50s style, halter with ruching and a sweet, low-cut bottom that makes you look like Natalie Woods waiting for James Dean, that's what.  This suit flatters EVERYONE.  I convinced Dr. Rei to get a similar style like, 6 years ago and it's still her go-to.  So I finally broke myself of my two-piece addiction and jumped into one-piece-ville and I LOVE THIS SUIT!  It's so cute on!  I really wanted something I could wear when I'm like, at the neighbourhood pool or like, at the cottage with my mother-in-law where I don't look like the neighbourhood tramp.  Not that there's anything wrong with looking like the neighbourhood tramp (why else am I getting up in the morning to run, if not to get myself into bikini-ready form?), but it's just not *always* appropriate.  Anyway, this suit is totally adorable and I'm pretty sure it would look good on everyone, which is why it was the go-to shape way back when, when women were allowed to be curvy and round.  Or in my case, flat-chested and boyish, in which case the gathering and boning around the bust gives the impression of curves.

I also just panic-purchased 2 more pairs of those Gap, really skinny black pants because I suddenly got all nervous that they were going to discontinue them or something and then I'd be SCREWED because I wore my one pair like, a million times this past year.  They were my go-to pants.  I can't say enough about how awesome these pants are.  Do you want something that looks good at work, with a blazer, a t-shirt, a sweater, a tunic top, with flats, heels, boots, or sneakers?  DO YOU?  Well you should!  Because if you DON'T, you're crazy!  So comfortable, so snug, more substantial than leggings, great material, perfect amount of stretch, wears in perfectly.  If Gap discontinues these pants, they're idiots.

This skirt is also on my radar.  Ever since I missed out on the pleated circle skirt from the Jason Wu for Target collaboration, I've been wanting a sweetly retro, full pleated skirt that would look so sharp with a crisp white short-sleeved blouse tucked in.  This one might be a little too self-consciously retro for me.  Also, I'm on a bit of a clothes buying diet.

I'm currently obsessed with looking like a lady.  Obsessed!  This is actually a long-running fixation that started lo so many years ago with my Marc Jacobs love.  Sweet rounded collars, tie necks, ruffles, prim buttons, and blouses, blouses, blouses galore!  Sheer blouses are huge right now.  I love mustard yellow - such a great neutral!  Goes well with navy, white, jeans, black, grey.  

This is the Des Colores blouse.  I already have it in a sapphire/teal sheer...but this blouse is sooo flattering!  I love it.  Granted, you have to wear a lot of layers underneath - bra, cami, then the blouse.  It definitely makes you need to upgrade your underwears.  All this dressing like a lady has me on the search for a SLIP! A SLIP!  What is this - Mad Men?!??!  As you can see, they also make the Des Colores blouse in solids...but the kelly green is the only colour I'd consider.  Otherwise, sheer all the way.

You can definitely see that I'm stuck on a certain refrain, here.  Soft, sheer, feminine, bold colours, fluttery sleeves (which are different from cap sleeves.  Cap sleeves - almost universally unflattering.  Fluttery sleeves - almost universally flattering).  

Finally, because I am either into dressing like a lady or into dressing like a 70s hippie mama (I just spent an hour bookmarking vintage muumuus), here is another more casual top for weekends, jeans, hanging out at the playground without looking like a tart.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...it's so satisfying cataloguing clothes I like.  It's satisfies the urge to buy without resulting in any spending.  That's why Pinterest is so successful, I guess.

  

Last night for dinner we had that Greek mac'n'cheese from Saveur magazine.  I did all the prep (sautéeing the spinach, grating the kefalotyri, etc.and the Dotytron put it together (making the bechamel, cooking the pasta).  I doubled the recipe for all the parts and used 2 boxes of whole wheat macaroni.  Has anyone else noticed that whole wheat pasta comes in smaller quantities than like Di Cecco or Barilla?  Like a box of Di Cecco macaroni is always 500 grams but a box of Cavatelli whole wheat macaroni is only 300-something grams.  Weird.  Anyway, it worked out well.  2 (300-something) boxes of whole wheat macaroni yielded 3 8" square casserole dishes of the macaroni and cheese.  We ate one last night and got to freeze 2 for the week.  Perfect!  That makes the time worthwhile.  I LOVE this dish.  It's creamy, cheesy, salty.  I love the freshness of the dill with the spinach.  I love the crispy breadcrumb topping.  So good.

Tonight we were supposed to have croque hermaphrodite...but the Dotytron went rogue and started improvising in the kitchen and it all went sideways.  I'm proud of myself, though: he still lives to tell the tale.

Fin.

Weekend photo recap

Busy, but enriching weekend.  On Friday night we took Momma D and Ehmdo to dinner at Pizzeria Libretto on the Danforth for Momma D's birthday.  I really love Libretto, especially the Danforth iteration, which takes reservations.  The food is consistent, the menu is appetizing, the food is well-executed, and the price is fair.  You can have a really nice meal for two with booze, all-in for under $100.  

The gnocchi fritti.  Little crispy balls of fried semolina (I think) gnocchi, with rosemary and a lemon cream smear on the bottom.

Siblings!

The porchetta appetizer.  I love this.  Pork belly, atop a square of their pizza dough, with chinotto (!!!) barbecue sauce, a tangle of arugala, cippolini onions, and best of all, thin slices of thai bird chilies.  Soooo good.

The Dotyron's salad of pancetta, arugala, pear, walnuts, brussels sprouts and a deep fried poached egg.

The Big Yam wearing Ehmdo's glasses.  He picked his own shirt to wear to daycare that day.  I figured that since I control every aspect of his life and tell him no so often, it's important to give him moments to have some agency.

We went to Riverdale Farm on Saturday and visited Poppa D at the Necropolis.  We saw all the animals running around.  The Big Yam was afraid of the chickens, which was kind of cute.  We also asked him what a cow says and he said, slowly and all sing-songy, "cooooooooooowww" and then followed it up with "mooo."  So cute!

On Saturday night we had S-Dawg over for dinner.  I made us a Passover-like meal of braised brisket with carrots and mushrooms.  Steamed green beans and a poppyseed kugel.  I made David Lebovitz's Chocolate Idiot Cake, which is flourless, rich, decadent, and dead easy.  It's embarrassingly easy and the results are to die for.  Served it with a dollop of crème fraîche to cut the richness a bit.  I can't stress enough what fantastic results this cake produces...it's definitely a recipe keeper.

Sunday morning brought a visit from this lil' lady with the cheeks that launched a thousand ships and the happiest, sweetest, open mouthed, sweet-lipped smile I've ever seen.

Coincidentally, it was National Eggs Benedict Day and I happened to make us tater tots eggs benny with crisped pancetta, avocado, and a lemony hollandaise.

Also, this happened.  All together now: awwwwwww!  

Sunday night we had dinner with K-Town and Bwonger and Dr. Rei at Banjara on Bloor West.  It was meh.  The food wasn't super-tasty, it was kind of expensive, and we got hosed into ordering too many parathas which were dry, wheaty, not that flaky, and not buttery enough.  We followed it up by heading to Menchie's for dessert.  Menchie's is a s**tshow.  Too many flavours, too many add-ins and the yogurt tastes really artificial.  I much prefer the fro-yo at Yutopia instead.  The taro flavour there is sooo good!  However, the trip to Menchie's did result in a lot of Dr. Rei lines about "Menchiewood" and how Menchie was way too into Menchiewood for his own good.

The Big Yam, as I've already mentioned, has a super-cute relationship with his Tai Poh (my Poh Poh).  They're basically like, best buds.  The last time we took her out for dinner with us, we dropped her off at home, I walked her to the door, and when I got back in the car, the Boobla lost his s**t.  He started crying and crying and calling out "Poh Poh! Poh Poh!" and was inconsolable for most of the ride home.  I think he thought we were getting out with her.  It was adorable slash heartbreaking.  Anyway, the Dotytron drew it to my attention the other day that the Big Yam has taken to kissing the photo of my grandma and grandpa that we keep in the living room.  So f**king cute, guys!

Fin.

Bedside Reading

My last book review was for The Fault in our Stars, and yet I feel like I've been reading a tonne since then, but can't remember anything.  It doesn't help that Academic Book Club is starting to go buck.  For our next meeting, we're reading: Judy Blume's Forever, an Erica Jong selection from the New York Times OR the entirety of Fear of Flying, a contemporary YA about teen sexuality, and they just threw in this literary erotica thing by Tamara Faith Berger (former sex columnist for Vice Magazine, back when you picked up a copy of Vice on your way to buy Geek Boutique phat pants - those who know, know!) called Maidenhead.  UMMMMM...REALLY?!?  I was like, "can you guys hop off my jock, because I would really love some non-book club related reading on my roster."  It took me forever just to catch up with the last reading (first time I'd ever attended a meeting without finishing the book!  I was deeply ashamed, actually, because I'm a total brown nose nerd).   Anyway, this is what I've been thumbing through of late:

This was Academic Book Club's last pick.  This is a loose continuation of Boyden's Governor General's Award-nominated novel, Three Day Road, which I read for work book club (review here).  This book is told in alternating chapters narrated by Will, an alcoholic, former-bush pilot uncle, lying in a coma in a Moosonee hospital, and his niece, Annie, a hunter and trapper who gets seduced by the life of modelling in New York City on the search for her sister, Suzanne.  The book jacket talks about "history, the secret that binds the two together" and all sorts of other, intriguing things, but the actual reality of the novel is that it's a bit of a plod.  The story is soap operaic and clumsy, the chapters narrated by Annie implausible (she's instantly taken up in the modelling world! She starts being seduced by the big city's drugs and glamour!) and amateurish.  While the character of Will is quite endearing and has a charming voice and a sad back story, I just couldn't get into this book.  It seemed to self-consciously an attempt to be "literary" and the menace of small town life in Northern Ontario veered too much into cariacture.  Actually, if I was to outline my problems with this book as a whole, it's that it too often devolved into cariacture and well-trod stereotypes.

So.  This book is kind of exciting because I was charged by Academic Book Club in my unofficial capacity as knower-of-all-things-YA (I would expand that to include "all things young and pop culture") to drum up a contemporary take on teen sexuality as a companion to Blume's Forever, which is a kind of after-school-special take on a girl pressured to have sex for the first time with the boyfriend she loves, only to find out after they do the deed that high school love isn't forever.  So I took to Twitter and asked E. Lockhart (author of the Ruby Oliver series and a personal hero of mine) and SHE RESPONDED!  DIRECT ACCESS TO ONE OF MY HERO AUTHORS!  The internet is a wonderful thing.  Anyway, she suggested Mlynowski's book, which is about a sixteen year old girl, April, whose parents got divorced after an infidelity.  She's living with her dad and his new wife, but when her dad decides to move (her mom and little brother moved to France with her mom's new beau), upset at the thought of leaving behind her life in Connecticut (and her boyfriend, Noel), she tricks her dad into letting her stay in her friend Vi's basement apartment.  Her dad thinks that Vi's mom is around when in actuality, Vi's mom is on tour.  What happens is a story told in the form of the 10 things that happened, and we follow April through her junior year as she lives on her own, deals with managing money and responsibility, and loses her virginity to her boyfriend.  This was an entertaining enough yarn, but pretty forgettable.  It wasn't DEEP YA, the way John Green is.  It wasn't gripping YA, the way fantasy stuff like Daughter of Smoke and Bone and Graceling are, and it wasn't super-squee teen love YA, the way Sarah Dessen is.  But, it did yield this line, which I thought was pretty sage advice:

"I guessed you had to forgive when you could, move on when you couldn’t, and love your family and friends for who they were instead of punishing them for who they weren’t." 

^^^ Right there.  Words to live by.  I need to do more of that in my life, fo' sho.

I had a brief dalliance with R. Crumb's illustrated Book of Genesis, but because Crumb does SUCH a phenomenal job of staying faithful to the source material (with language lifted from the Book of Genesis direct)...it's kind of borez0rz.  Yeah, crazy shiz happens in the Book of Genesis, but it's also hella boring with much begatting of so and so and more begatting and so and so living 800 years and begatting blah blah blah.  I feel like Bible stories are way more scandalous when they're retold and paraphrased.  This book does give Crumb the opportunity to revel in his (obvious) love for drawing round, bulbous people with tonnes of hair and semi-grotesque features.  That's kind of his thing.  

In other pop culture news, the internet has exploded recently with hype surrounding Lena Dunham's new, Judd Apatow-backed series, Girls, on HBO.  The talk around this has been kind of crazy, really.  It's like the whole Noah Baumbach-led crowd in NYC has taken over every intelligentsia media outlet and everyone is weighing in.  When you think about it, the Noah Baumbach-led crowd is actually a very, very small subset of society (same with the people who actually watched Dunham's feature-length debut, Tiny Furniture) - infinitesimally small, really.  I watched the first episode, which is available in its entirety on Youtube, and I dunno...it's aight.  She's been likened to Louis C.K., but I find her a lot less funny and the show has way less heart.  Louis C.K. is way more self-aware and class-conscious than Dunham's character/fictional proxy is.  Louis C.K. seems to have way more important things to say about stuff that matters - parenting, being a schlub, being depressed, race, class, the military, than Dunham's crew of disaffected, entitled, privileged mid-twenties crew.  It's basically people who are super-elite (daughters of artists, professors, etc.) with liberal arts degrees that aren't getting them anywhere, doing internships, having gross early 20s tattooed sex with losers, and then thinking about their lives too much without enough hilariousness happening (like, with NO hilariousness happening).  And characters you can't root for.  Not a winning combo, IMO.  

It keeps getting compared to Sex and the City, which I believe the media has turned more into a cultural phenomena than it actually was for anyone who wasn't a woman living in New York City at the time.  I watched Sex and the City as a semi-engaging soap opera that didn't really super-duper hold my attention.  The media would have you believe that it was THE defining show for a generation of women.  If it is, then that's super, extremely, really, really, really sad.  I can't even handle it.  

Thank goodness we have Jennifer Lawrence in this world.  Seriously, this girl is the bomb.  I'm obsessed with her.  From an interview she gave recently in Hello Magazine: 

"You know what made me fall in love with Katniss?  It was that, for once, this is a woman in a movie who is focused on something other than who her boyfriend is.  She's forced into an arena to fight for survival - she's thrown into a way and becomes a political figure without even realizing it - and that is far more interesting than her romantic life.  Look.  I loved working with both Josh and Liam.  But as far as Katniss is concerned, I think that with all she has going on, the very bottom of her priorities list is the question of who her next boyfriend is going to be."  

Then there was the series of charming talk-show interviews she did in the run-up to the Hunger Games, where her loveable, self-deprecating, adorable self really shone through and made me love her more.  This bit about feeling like an idiot flying first class, is but one example why:

Talking about an intense Harry Potter-related conversation?!  Quit it!  She's a doll.  Love that girl to bits.

I dunno...I feel like I'm either too old and conservative and too young and immature to be into Girls.  I like Mindy Kaling and the Hunger Games and Louis C.K. and my new favorite show, Downton Abbey.  Which I read as "DownTOWN Abbey" for the longest time and then had a conversation with my colleague about it (before I started watching) in the fall where I kept calling it "DownTOWN Abbey" and she corrected me in a polite way by saying it properly like, half a dozen times and I still didn't clue in.  LOL!  Anyway, this show is a very pleasant soap opera.  I'm a little conflicted because I obviously have problems with the British gentry and the class system and the show has a way of making it seem like the quiet nobility of the staff is the awesomest thing ever or at least, humanizing and normalizing the inequities of the economic social strata.  Let me be clear here: the British fixation with breeding and class is a horrible, horrible thing.  But the show is a delightful diversion.  It makes me laugh because they'll show "scenes from next week's episode" and it'll be someone sitting on a gorgeous settee with a knitted brow saying something like, "there are rumours that you are NOT a virtuous woman!" and me and the Dotytron are sitting there, mouths agape, going, "OH NO YOU DI'N'T!"  The anachronisms are part of what makes it so hilarious.  

Sigh.  Downton and Game of Thrones are making me so happy right now.  Anything that's miles away from the headspace of sad-sack entitled, lily-white a-holes in NYC, please!

Fin.

Cleveland round-up!

Our long weekend in Cleveland was obviously the bestest.  We booked it down there early Friday morning and got into town around 12:30pm.  Even though it's a bit of a long haul, because we were there most of Friday, all Saturday, and had brunch with the wedding party on Sunday, you didn't feel like the 11 hours of total driving was all for just a couple hours of fun.  Oh no...it was an ENTIRE WEEKEND OF FUN!  


We rolled into town, got to check into our hotel early, and then headed to Happy Dog, which is our NEW FAVORITEST RESTAURANT ON EARTH.  The concept is simple, but amazing.  You pick either a $5 1/4 lb hot dog or a veggie dog, and then load on as many toppings as you want, from a list of 50 different toppings:

Then you pick either fries or tater tots for $3 and you can pick from 19 different side sauces to dip from for free, or add any number of extra toppings for an extra $1.  BOSS.  This place is THE BOMB!  Check it out, they have seated DJing, or as the Dotytron called it, "living the dream:"  

The danger with Happy Dog is that you can go a little nuts with your toppings, if you're prone to straying from classic combos (ie. Dr. Rei and the Dotytron) and end up with a hot mess.  I tended to stick with tried and true variations.  The Dotytron messed up one of his dogs by going buck, but for his other one, he went with one from a list of suggested combos (Michael Symon's picks) which sounded weird but tasted awesome: peanut butter, bacon, chopped onion, and Oaxacan red chile and chocolate mole sauce.  

The other thing we learned about Cleveland is that this town is SERIOUS about their craft brews.  It's a religion down there.  The beer list at Happy Dog is also boss.  I seriously want to open one, here. 

On Saturday this crew walked to a park for the sake of the two cousins, who promptly passed out en route.  This is us in front of the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame, which we obviously didn't go into because I don't like paying money to see Bono's glasses in a glass cube.  I don't know for sure that Bono's glasses are in the collection, but I'm guessing that it's 90% Bono's glasses and 10% guitar picks.

Pretty bad-a** public art in Cleveland.  Like this Claes Oldenburg stamp, which we then found out was commissioned by BP oil.  Booooooooooooo.

Because we couldn't get enough of Happy Dog, we went there for Saturday lunch with the groom-to-be.  Seriously, I can't impress on you enough how much we loved Happy Dog.

Me and the Big Yam, wedding bound

Uncle Rico, upon seeing the Big Yam en route to wedding, exclaimed, "He looks like a model!"  LOL!

First dance...awwwwwwwwwwww.

The wedding was super-fun!  So I don't want to brag or nothing, but I basically saved the wedding and someone's life.  I saved the wedding when A (the bride) called me over and asked me to distribute programs to all the guests, who had mostly come through a different entrance and missed the stack of them.  No big deal, just another day in the life of a wedding-saver.  Then, my mom's "date" (her friend A), had a glass of the pineapple punch and because she is a drinking lightweight like me, FAINTED IN MY ARMS while I was talking to them about  where we were going to sit.  So I helped her onto the floor.  It was like a less funny version of the time the Dotytron fainted at Au Pied Du Cochon.  A was out for a good minute.  It was a little scary.  I hope she remembers how I saved her life so that I can call in a favour one day.  She better!

Then S-Dawg took A back to her hotel room.  S-Dawg's gf didn't come to the wedding, so during the dancing, when people were all coupled off, I asked him, "S, are you sad?" and he said, "A [my mom's friend] is by herself right now!  Of course I'm sad!  She's alone, she's scared..."  LOL!!!  Because of course we had to make everything inappropriate by joking about how S undressed A before putting her in bed and took her socks off with his teeth.  Hahahaha...I love my inappropriate family.

The two cousins.  

Watching the two cousins together all weekend was cute.  The Big Yam kept trying to kiss Little Big Cuz and was getting rebuffed all the time.  The Big Yam is a pretty sweet kid.  If you tell him, "go give so-and-so a hug/kiss" he generally does it.  Little Big Cuz was having none of it.  Which meant that every time Little Big Cuz had his back turned to the Boobla, the Boobla would walk over and try to sneak a kiss onto his back.  So cute!  

The Big Yam's daycare provider is seriously his biggest fan.  Every time when I drop him off, I give him a kiss and tell him to be a good boy and to listen to J and every day she looks at me like I'm crazy and says, "All the time.  He is perfect.  He is an angel (except she pronounces it an-hel)."  I find it so funny.  Today she was telling me how he's so mature (there's another kid there who is exactly 1 month younger than the Big Yam) and how she can set him down at a table to play with the older girls (who are 3) with play dough or sand and how he doesn't ever try to eat it.  But the slightly younger kid eats the play dough and sand EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.  LOL!  So cute!  Calling a toddler "mature" is really funny.  It's not very cleary from the photo above, but the Boobla's head is about 1 1/2 times the size of Little Big Cuz's.  Also really funny.

I'm still getting post-traumatic stress every now and then.  For some reason, maybe because he's been growing so much and I love this stage of his life SO HARD right now, I'm realizing how narrowly we dodge a bullet?  Every now and then this past week I've been getting flashes of him at the bottom of the stairs.  And of him looking up at me from the CT scan table with the neck brace on his neck and looking soooo sad and scared and lost.  Worst thing ever.  

It is a magical thing watching a being that started off as a two cells rapidly dividing, plant their feet, point at the moon, and say, "moon."  The human brain!  

Tonight for dinner we had chicken katsu oyako don with brown rice.

Fin.

Quickie

A short little video of the Big Yam's Cantonese in action.  He says the numbers 8 and 9 and his intonation is actually pretty good!  He doesn't actually know what they mean - it's rote memorization.

Fin.

Culture I can't get behind (aka stoops kids)

On Sunday night we watched the movie Drive.  When this came out, I felt like my FB exploded with peeps going bats**t for this flick.  After having seen it, I totally don't get it!  It was so boring!  Nothing happens!  It's all style and hipster-posturing, with no substance.  From the 80s hot-pink font of the title credits to the director's fixation with Ryan Gosling's character's gold scorpion embossed white quilted jacket (the director was OBSESSED!), I thought it was just hipster-bait.  I didn't get what there was to love about the movie.  The film's story is completely implausible and makes no sense, it glorifies in violence for the sake of gratuitous violence and the casting!!!  Egregious!!!  We're supposed to believe that Carey Mulligan (below), is a waitress, named Irene, who got knocked up at seventeen, by a dude who is in prison, and has a son named Benicio.  !!!!!!!!  

And somehow, through her moochie-face (which is what me and my sis call a certain squinty, pursed lip, Renee  Zellweger-esque face), she is the white light in Ryan Gosling's life?!?  C'maaaan.  Does that woman up there look like the kind of woman who gets knocked up at 17?!?  Jeez.  Cast like, Kristen Stewart or something.  Someone believable.  Then there was the soundtrack.  The director used Lynch's go-to man, Angelo Badalementi, which was obvious in the first few seconds of music in the film.  Here's the thing though, when you combine Lynch and Badalementi, Lynch has a way of using Badalementi's excesses and reigning them in so that you have something very eerie and surreal - something suffused with a feeling of foreboding.  This director though, just made the 80s-referencing principal refrain into a weird, cheap, music video with slowed-down shots for no reason.  Overall, I just found it boring.  As Bwong said, "Drive = John Hughes edits David Lynch footage" or as Dr. Rei said, "what's to like about this?  People turning around slowly?!?"  

We also watched 1 hour of Hugo before quitting because it was so borez0rz.  Total, total boringness.  As the Dotytron said at the point in which we stopped, "this is way too long for something not awesome to happen."  LOL!  It's so true!!! NOTHING AWESOME HAPPENS!  It's a kid's movie!!!  


So we've had bad luck on the movie front lately.  I have some good ones on deck but the Dotytron is being resistant, I'm not sure why.


In other culture news, Toronto's free weekly, Now Magazine recently published an article about this band of just-barely-not-teenagers named BBNG (BadBadNotGood) who are receiving fame and attention because they did jazz versions of Odd Future tunes and attracted the attention (and daps) of Tyler the Creator.  Here's the article: BadBadNotGood.  It was brought to my attention by the Dotytron, who was up in arms, because the stoops kids in the article dissed the school they're going to, Humber College's Jazz Music program (the Dotytron's alma mater) and the faculty, and did the usual stoops kid thing of complaining that the program is full of dorks and is stodgy and lame, etc.  So all the faculty, who are like, pretty big deals in the jazz scene generally and locally, have been posting replies, which the Dotytron got wind of.  The replies have been stuff to the effect that these kids might just want to play with the same people they're dissing one day, so that it's not the wisest move.  The author of the article is an idiot, and so are the kids, obviously, because they assume that all jazzers are boring and out of touch, SIMPLY because these kids know who Tyler the Creator and like, Pitchfork are.  THAT'S THE LAMEST SHIZ I'VE EVER HEARD!  Guess what stoops kids?  NO ONE CARES ABOUT PITCHFORK!  TYLER THE CREATOR IS NOT AN ARBITER OF TASTE, HE'S JUST ANOTHER STOOPS KID LIKE YOU.  And this is coming from someone (me) who loves nothing more than to talk about how the jazz scene is full of nerdlingers...but at the same time, there are people out there doing boss things, and even those people (like Robert Glasper, referenced in the article) are being dissed by those stoops kids.  


My problem with this is multi-fold.  


1) Those kids doing a live instrument version of Odd Future is totally musically the boringest.  It's akin to when people put out "baby" CDs with like, Metallica songs on it or like, Radiohead, but turned into lullabies. I find that stuff impossibly juvenile and boring and lame and one-note.
2) WHO CARES WHAT TYLER THE CREATOR THINKS?!?
3) Why is the media slavishly lapping up what the Odd Future kids are doing, acritically?  Isn't the job of the music journalist to be a place of sober second thought, to reflect on the work of artists, not to jump on like Tyler et al. are the saviors of rap and the new apostles?!??!!  It's embarrassing to the max.
4) Stoops kids are super-annoying
5) BTW, according to the Dotytron, those kids aren't even good musicians.  They're just aight.  


The culture of mediocrity triumphs again.  


This letter to the editor in response to the article was the best:


Jazz lesson for BBNG

NOW is at its bully-pulpit best with its cover on BADBADNOTGOOD (NOW, March 22-28). Writer Anupa Mistry – if she can explain exactly what a “deranged bebop fugue” is, I’ll eat one of my jazz students’ boat shoes  – is palpably excited at the prospect of her imminent takedown of the twin straw men of jazz traditionalism and educational institutionalism.

The article is facilitated by her trio of “jazz futurists” who uncritically grant Mistry the pretext required to rail against jazz music’s assumed “fusty codes,” cloistered elitism, fetishization of rote virtuosity over individual creativity and, my personal favourite, ossification (proven, apparently, by jazz’s presupposed reluctance to include Odd Future’s Ass Milk as part of its mouldy canon).

If I’ve understood Mistry’s “through the looking glass” history correctly, then John Coltrane and Charlie Parker (two of the most significant musicians of the 20th century who both died young and underappreciated) are part of music’s fat cat hegemony while Pitchfork Music and James Blake remain marginalized?

Andrew Scott
Toronto

OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!  Snap!  


For our family holiday Monday yesterday, we had fat baby with Mennonite garlic breakfast sausage for breakfast:

Then we did fun stuff like play outside and go to PacMall to get a cute Ipad cover and eat froyo at Yutopia and then we came home and had a dinner of single-crust tourtiere with pan-fried brussels sprouts and roasted carrots:

Then we watched episode 2 of Game of Thrones which is all kinds of bucksauce.  George R.R. Martin is a bit of a sick bastardo. It doesn't sound like much, but it was a near-perfect day.

Tonight we had tarte flambée (Alsatian pizza, topped with creme fraiche, caramelized onions, lardons, and for one of them, a baked duck egg) and a salad:


So good!


Fin.

The weird language

When we were hanging at the Dotytron's Aunt's place on Sunday, the Big Yam was being a little clingy for some reason (possibly because he was getting assaulted by dog licks) and didn't want to do anything but sit on my lap.  He started pointing at one of their pot lights, and Momma D goes, "what does he call them again?  He's has this weird language"  LOL!!!  For the record, he calls them "dang dang" which is Cantonese for a lamp or light.  So awesome.  I'm not offended because it comes from a well-intentioned, if a little ignorant place.  I mean, I really don't think my mother-in-law is racist.  Haha!  It's only going to get weirder when we enroll in family Mandarin classes.  

The Dotytron is against 99% of extracurricular programming for children before a certain age.  He thinks it's a waste of money and (more importantly) a waste of his weekend time to be schlepping a kid to go to "music classes" (ie. song and story circles) or like, "playball" or something.  I'm indifferent.  I didn't get enrolled in non-swimming programming until I was in like, the junior grades and my mum and Big D needed somewhere to take us during summer vacation.  Wait, I might have done ballet for a year or two when I was 5 or 6.  The Dotytron's number 1 enemy is paying for music classes.  Number 2 enemy is parent and tot swimming where you're paying to be in a pool to teach your kid how to blow bubbles in the water.  The only children's extracurricular programming the Dotytron is willing to exert any energy over is a weekend language class (which will most likely be Mandarin).  MHui has been scaring the craps outta me because she's saying that secondary language acquisition peters out for kids by age SIX.  AGE SIX!!! I'm ramping up my Cantonese speaking to the Big Yam.  I only wish I was better at speaking Cantonese and had another language to teach, too!  One of the Big Yam's friends at daycare has a mom who only speaks French to him and a dad who only speaks Spanish.  And then he get English from everyone else.  He's slow to talk but it's all in there.  He's a pretty lucky kid!  His mom speaks French to the Boobla, too.  Which is good.  

Three posts in a row!  I'm on a roll!  

I woke up stupid early this morning to prep dinner, which was oyster po' boys with remoulade on my favorite buns of life - the rolls sold at Strickland's.  They're soft, yielding, flour dusted, perfection.  We had this with a ceasar salad so I had to soak the oysters, make the croutons, prep the romaine, and make the remoulade.  I also boiled and peeled 8 eggs for on-the-road egg salad sandwich breakfast for us.  I know, I'm insane.  But look at the results:

So worth it. Milk soaked, egg dredged, flour-and-cornmeal-paper-bag-shook oysters, fried crisp, and piled on a soft bun smeared with remoulade and some salad greens courtesy of E's winter CSA food share that she gifted us with last night.  AND ceasar salad?  Happiness!  

I also made my current favorite breakfast.  It's this egg sandwich thing from Deb from Smitten Kitchen by way of Joanna Goddard's A Cup of Jo blog.  It's supposed to be a homemade rendition of a NYC bodega egg sandwich.  I wouldn't know what that tastes like, because when I travel to NYC, eating from a bodega is the last thing on my mind.  Bodega eating is for NYC residents only, I believe.  Anyway, I took one look at the pictures and thought: GENIUS!  So easy!  I've been using a slice off a block of aged cheddar for the cheese in the middle and 2 eggs (no water) for my 9" cast iron pan...but that makes for a bit of a thicker egg pancake which is a little harder to fold, so in the future, I'm going to be more restrained and go with just 1 egg.

Seriously, ^^^ that right there, sandwiched between the two halves of a lightly toasted Pita Break One Bun is a damn good breakfast.  

Trying to get some packing done tonight.  Strangely dreaming of a vacation to Austin and San Antonio?!??? Who's in?  Chef H: I'm looking in your direction.

Fin.

When you find yourself in times of trouble...

the answer to lifting your spirits is usually amigurumi.  You know, those super-cute, wee, Japanese crocheted or knitted stuffies.  The ultimate in spirit-lifting would logically be the entire main cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation in amigurumi form, obviously!

AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!  *dies*  Whoever made these came to the sound decision to do late-series bearded Riker.  Also, Data's eyes are the best.  The best episodes were all the holodeck Sherlock Holmes ones, followed closely by anything involving the Borg.

Uhhhhh...yeah.  I'm done being a giant nerdliner, thanks.

Actually, not quite.  So I went to see The Hunger Games a second time with Dr. Rei which was obviously the hardest thing in the world for me to do because the movie doesn't hold up to repeat viewings.  Just kidding!  April Fool's!  Opposite day lasted for just the preceding sentence!  IT WAS TOTALLY AWESOME THE SECOND TIME AROUND.  The best was getting to hash it out with Dr. Rei after, when she said that, "the one major complaint I have, and I know it's a small one, is that they didn't focus on the FOOD enough!"  LOL!  So then we started talking about the lamb stew with plums that Katniss loved so much and Dr. Rei was talking about the "pearly grains of polished rice" that I didn't even remember but that apparently made a huge impression on her.  So funny.  I love that girl.

Soooooooo...we got an iPad.  I know, I know.  We're not even like, app-y people.  But I'm semi-addicted to the nerdiest game ever (STILL not done being a giant nerdlinger!), which is this spelling/word jumble game called Word Warp.  On Saturday, before the movie, I think I managed to get Dr. Rei hooked on it as well, resulting in her saying (when Word Warp refused to accept a perfectly legitimate word), "this has the paws of Word Mole [a word game on the Blackberry] all over it!"  LOL!!!  We like letting the Big Yam play sneaky learning games on it.  It's kind of blowing his mind that his favorite app, I Hear Ewe (where you touch cartoon pictures of animals and this disjointed, supremely disaffected male voice says, "This is the sound a rhinoceros [raccoon, zebra, frog, etc] makes" followed by a real life recording of the animal sound), is so much bigger than it is on the Ipod touch.  He's loving life.  As an aside: zebras make CRAZY sounds.  Like, if you were to imagine what a zebra sound liked, you'd think horselike, right?  WRONG!  They kind of make these weird, keening, "yip yip!" noises.  It's bizarre.  Knowledge I wouldn't have without I Hear Ewe.  I'm loving life because I get to spend my before-reading bed time playing Word Warp times a billion.  And because now I can get the iPad-only version of Gourmet magazine.  That's basically all I use it for.  The Dotytron has been obsessed with playing this learn Cantonese game that I downloaded for the Big Yam.  It's super-cute.  He gets SO MAD when he doesn't get it right and he's SO HAPPY when he does get a few in a row right and they let you pick one of the "stickers" to put on the sticker page.

We've been talking about getting one forever and when we finally decided to pull the trigger, the Dotytron was asking me what we should get engraved on the back (if anything) and I immediately said: "San Dimas High School Football Rules" and he paused and said, "I knew there was a reason I married you."  LOL!

Ta-da!

Okay.  I think I'm done nerdlinger-ing out.  The other thing that totally raised my spirits today was going for a Kenzo Ramen lunch with MHui, G, and Dr. Rei.  Mmmmm...tonkotsu ramen with gyoza and takoyaki (fried octopus balls).

Other things that make me happy?  The other day, the Big Yam was in his high chair and we were in the kitchen getting breakfast put away.  We always make a point of kissing each other in front of him and then saying, "See? Mama and Baba love each other."  So we stood in the doorway of the kitchen and I called out to the Boobla, "Hey Master T!  Look!  Mama and Baba love each other." and we gave each other a smooch and we turned to look at him and he was sitting there, with both hands holding the far edge of the tray like he was bracing himself, and BEAMING at us with this big, silly, stupid, pleased grin on his face.  It was the funniest thing I've ever seen.  

I went for a run today.  DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN.  I'm getting semi-serious about success.  And by success I mean getting back into a regular routine of yoga, and running so that my heart doesn't explode during softball.  I still hate running.  I think I always will.  If it wasn't for old skool jungle mixes on the Toronto Rave Mixtape archive, I wouldn't last a second.  I have very very modest goals - 5 km in 30 minutes.  And if I don't meet that goal, I will be negative 10 trillion degrees upset.  See?  Reach for the stars!  Or reach for the closest piece of fried chicken!  Whatever floats your boat.

Work continues to be buzaaaay.  My colleagues be wigging.  Me?  I like being busy...and I like feeling the presh.  It's good.  I'm falling behind on school work...but it's still all good.  Getting so excited for my long weekend of fun (please, Captain Save-a-Ho...don't break down on us!)

Tonight E came over for dinner.  We had mulligatawny soup with red lentils and brown rice and coconut milk, and samosas from Bombay Chowpatty, this place close to us that specializes in chaat.

Fin.

BLARGH!

Blargh is how it is around here and blargh is how I'm feeling folks.  Because I am a child of the new millienium (in spirit, if not in age) then I will report back to you, my ever faithful readers, in a list format:


The Good:
- finished a paper 8 days early!  This stunning display of anti-procrastinatory behaviour is brought to you by the time-honoured technique of "repurposing a paper from a previous master's degree"
- had a family and friend filled (if not exactly restful) weekend
- this is a four day work week, which will be followed up by a 3 day work week
- we will be spending the weekend in Cleveland celebrating the nuptials of Chef H and his bride-to-be, A (and my fam-bam will be there, too!)


The Bad:
- I have to finish another paper this week and prepare a 15 minute conference presentation on it by next Saturday
- work is INSANELY busy.  Like, so busy that I'm being run off my feet and the pleasant sensation of feeling under the gun has morphed into the slightly queasy, sweat-inducing sensation of seeing the bullet coming at you 1000 miles a minute
- the weekend was busy and thus our house is a giant pigsty of disgustingness
- there is no time to clean up said giant pigsty of disgustingness
- I haven't been home enough lately to spend QT with the Big Yam and it makes me sad because he's kind of the best right now.


I don't know how I'm going to reconcile everything.  Academic Book Club continues to pile on the homework (2 books and an article?!?) and our meetings are now on a regular schedule (first Thursday of the month, instead of when it works out for everyone).  Work Book Club has started back as well.  I'm feeling really behind on my reading, between the two book club's required reading and the ever-growing list of new stuff I want to delve into.


I have a quilt I want to make for the roomie's bambino.  I have assorted things I want to start working on - not the least of which is getting my ducks in order for the kitchen reno...which is probably still over a year off, but I want to know exactly what I'm getting and have everything priced out so that when the time comes, I can just pull the trigger.  I'm thinking white, Shaker-style cabinets with really exaggerated, modern pulls, grey counters, a grey cork or tile floor, and an acid yellow backsplash.  Some open shelving, magnetic knife rack, and some wire baskets to hold onions and potatoes and fruit and such.  

This is the stove I want.  I'm really set on dual ovens, and I can't afford like, a Viking or anything.  This is a Fisher Paykel - I like the big oven-little oven combo...I would first have to see if the little oven can fit a half sheet tray.  If it can't, then it's kind of pointless and I would just go with one oven, which is what I've been working with for the past ten years.

This is the sink I want.  It's a Kohler stainless steel "smart divide".  A DOUBLE SINK WITH A LOW DIVIDER.  Genius!!!  Serious, serious genius!  All the benefits of a double sink AND a farmstand sink!

I'm not wedded to this model, but when we finally (FINALLY!) get a dishwasher...I want a Bosch or a Miele.  I told you: I'm not f**king around any more.  This is for reals.

Of course, it remains to be seen if we can actually blow like 10gs just on appliances...but I want my kitchen to be boss...otherwise, I'd rather just save up for longer until I can get the one I want.  

Tonight's dinner was a reuben sammy with leftover St. Paddy's corned beef.  I also had a salad alongside.  

Back to the grind, sons.  Back to the grind.

Fin.