06.06.07
Posted in Personal, Books at 5:03 pm by Joe Blubaugh
If you ever, ever see Paul Bocuse In Your Kitchen anywhere, you must, must buy it! It’s a compendium of simple classics from the master of fancy French food. Stuff you can make at home easily with a basic but decently-equipped kitchen. I borrowed Kat’s copy, and I’m going to need to go to the library and photocopy a lot before she comes back up here. There’s a recipe in there called Tomate Provencal that is just the most basic delicious idea I never thought of. I added a green pepper to the recipe, and I love it:
Baked Vegetable Dinner:
- 1 tomato
- 1 green pepper
- Olive Oil
- Pepper
- Basil
- Garlic
Preheat oven to 450 F (240 C) Chop the tomato and pepper in half. Place them in a baking dish with the tomato cut side up and the pepper cut side down. Sprinkle the basil and garlic atop. Pepper the veggies lightly. Drizzle with olive oil and place in oven. Cook for 25 minutes.
So good!
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05.22.07
Posted in Movies, Books at 5:57 pm by Joe Blubaugh
Yahoo! has a full page up, including a theatrical trailer for The Golden Compass. It’s funny to see Eva Green and Daniel Craig in another movie together so soon. This book was so, so good, but I find myself worrying just what they’ll cut out. It’s likely that the subtleties of adolescent sexual awakening will be largely subsumed by the adventure story, but that’s a shame. The whole series hinges on sexual awakening, the concept of sin, individualism, and authoritarianism.
If they make it through the series-as-movie run, here’s hoping that they let the small, sweet moments of the books make the large impacts they’re supposed to.
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05.20.07
Posted in Books at 4:34 pm by Joe Blubaugh
I know that I’m a year behind the times here, but you should really read Absurdistan. A satiric novel that can name-drop Joseph Heller without it feeling like an attention-grab or a too-knowing wink deserves some attention. It’s got an over-obvious author stand-in character, which makes a great skewer for the self-congratulatory Hemingway style. It’s got a great Russian mirror of all the misguided idealism and willful ignorance that we apply to our foreign policy in this country.
We’re all graduates of Accidental College.
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05.15.07
Posted in Books at 10:18 pm by Joe Blubaugh
When you first meet Chuck Palahniuk, you’re not sure that it’s him. He’s slender, with big ears and a quick smile. Is this the same guy who wrote about a psychic death poem, the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival, and a split-personality terrorist who was just looking for love? He doesn’t speak like he writes, either. He’s mannered, and he considers his words before he speaks. He doesn’t curse.
Listen to him long enough, though, and his authorial voice comes through, as if his characters are really a way of amplifying aspects of himself. The gleeful way that he recounts stories (he once got an American executive hopped up on pain pills and scotch), and his stirring recollections of finding meaning in unexpected places bring to mind the best parts of his prolific collection (he’s written ten books in ten years). His taste for the macabre didn’t start to come out until later in the talk, when he told a series of severed finger stories and began tossing fake limbs into the audience.
The crowd at a Palahniuk talk is different from most ‘meet-the-author’ crowds. A man who was there with his daughter observed that “it’s heartwarming to see so many young people reading.” It seems, though, that many of the attendees would rather be the tragic accidents of characters that inhabit a Palahniuk novel than learn the lessons that his characters ignore. His main characters do have a fatalistic allure, but one can only hope that the youth are savvy to the lesson and not just the surface glitz.
What great surface glitz it is, though, and Chuck Palahniuk brought plenty of it to Alverno tonight. He read two unpublished stories, “Cold Calling” and “Love Nest.” The former story showcases his all his strenghts: an alienated hero in a dead-end job makes an improper but meaningful connection with somebody, then helps it all unravel as he discovers the artifice that holds the relationship together. It’s really a powerful one, and I hope that we’ll eventually get to see it in published form.
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