Librari[d]an

What is this!? Pace yourself, man! Not too many recipes at once! Actually, I plan on adding recipes as I make them. Just makes the most sense. So. What is obscene about this pizza dough? Well, it never turns out the same twice. Not ever! That makes it obscenely dynamic and interesting. But the results are always scrumptious, even when I put so many spices on that it tanks my sisters’ stomaches.

:: Jen and Kate’s Mystery Pizza Dough ::

2 1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast (or just a package, if you don’t feel like measuring)
1/2 teaspoon brown sugar (or cane sugar)
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 teaspoon salt (I use less)
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 1/3 cups flour

1. In a large bowl, dissolve the yeast and brown sugar in the water, and let sit for 10 minutes. (If the water it too hot or too cold the yeast won’t metabolize the sugar, so be careful.)

2. Stir the salt and oil into the yeast solution. Mix in 2 1/2 cups of the flour. (Use any type of flour you want. I have had excellent results with all-purpose, unbleached, whole-wheat, and even graham flour.) Add spices to the dough if you’re feeling bold and forward!

3. Turn the dough out onto a clean, well floured surface and knead in a bit more flour until the dough is no longer sticky. Place the dough into a bowl sprayed with non-stick cooking spray and cover with a cloth. Let the dough rise approximately one hour. (A warm and humid place is best. Try putting it on top of the stove as the oven preheats.)

4. Top with your favorite pizza sauce and fixings. This recipe should make two substantial pizzas. (I like to use meatless spaghetti sauce that’s low in sodium. As for fixings, experiment. One of my favorite combinations is white onion and chick peas!)

4. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit/220 degrees Celsius. If you are using a pan/baking sheet rather than a pizza stone, be sure to spray it with non-stick cooking spray. Bake the pizza until the cheese and crust are done to your liking (about 15 to 20 minutes).

I have cut a lot of the useless, time-wasting steps out of this recipe. (I like to keep things simple, but not in a reductive way–like Bush’s State of the Union a few hours ago. Although, I did like the way he spit out the second part of this sentence: “If we fail to pass this agreement, we will embolden the purveyors of false populism in our hemisphere.”)

But yeah, that hour for the dough to rise still turns some people’s screws. I find it easy to deal with, especially if you have the foresight to plan your evening. (“Company at the door? Why, I just happen to have pizza dough ready to be garnished and consumed!”) Also, if your friends are over, enlist their help in making the dough first, then socialize, then complete the recipe and feast.

:: Bibliography ::

Jen probably got this sucker from the internet. Everyone’s taking credit for it, look.

Shut up! No, really. Shut up. In all likelihood you haven’t even seen Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964), let alone viewed it recently with a critical eye. I was like you once. I thought the film was a joke, the beginning of Hitchcock’s cinematic decline. I have come to realize, over time, that this is far from the truth; Marnie was Hitchcock’s last truly great film.

Marnie falls easy prey to critics for an obvious reason: Like Hitchcock’s Spellbound, the emphasis on psychoanalysis dates the film. (For a bizarre look at the not-so-hidden sexual imagery/dialog embedded in the film, check out this video. I think the creep who made it has to be a total freak, a “sex maniac” if you will.) Marnie lacks the clout that a dream sequence created by Salvador Dalí and star power (Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck) provide. Don’t get me wrong, Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren are stars… However they’ve both developed an air of camp.

So what makes Marnie so good, despite the flaws? (It certainly isn’t the sloppy stunt work with the horse!) And let’s not rely on silly auteur prattle about motifs in Hitchcock’s canon of work. (She’s blonde? Amazing. She adopts a variety of identities? You don’t say!) But let’s begin with that blonde. The blonde with the pinched features and shrill voice. The perfectly imperfect Hitchcock blonde, Tippi Hedren. Hedren became the Galatea to Hitchcock’s Pygmalion because she was a natural in front of the camera. Now, the title role in Marnie isn’t exactly an easy part to play: Sexually frigid. Kleptomaniac safe-cracker. Compulsive and convincing liar. Phobic of the color red and thunder/lightning. (No wonder why the French title is Pas de printemps pour Marnie, “No Spring for Marnie”. This woman’s got problems!) Yet somehow Hedren is able to pull it off. Just look at the film’s infamous rape scene, in which Hedren is equal parts desperate, defenseless child and resistant woman (resistant in terms of her passivity, her utter disconnect from the physical violation she suffers). And what about the scene at the racetrack, where Hedren has to convey the schism between her false persona (socially adept businesswoman) and true one (nervous, saturnine anomic). Of course, there are many scenes in which Hedren simply can’t hold her character together. (”The colors! Stop the colors!”) But who could?

The second redeeming quality of the film is Bernard Herrmann’s lavish, misunderstood score. (Listen to the Prelude in this theatrical trailer for the film. Also, note Hitchock’s hilarious one-liners: “She does seem a rather excitable type” reduced me to tears!) It is mostly considered a melodramatic, Romantic mess of a composition. This may or may not be true. What his music does reflect, however, is an externalization of the emotional, child-like tumult Hedren’s character experiences thrroughout the film. Of course, I would be remiss in not crediting the director, Hitch, for making a contribution or two. Remember the scene in which Marnie robs an employer after hours? The audience is on tenterhooks as she cracks and empties the safe, removes her shoes, and soberly attempts her escape without being noticed by a cleaning woman–only to drop one of her high-heels! This suspenseful sequence alone is worth forgiving Hitchcock the sillier fare in the final reel.

I plan on posting more about the formal achievments of Marnie in the future. Keep an eye peeled.

My sister Jen and I always wanted to have our own televised cooking show called “Obscene Cuisine”. We hoped to purvey recipes that seemed disgusting, but ultimately culminated in surprisingly delicious foods. Our pilot dishes ranged from gelatin filled with a sundry list of reprehensibles to deep-fried sticks of butter. So now you know why this feature is not elegantly entitled “L’amour de la gastronomie”. Obscene Cuisine is about my culinary misadventures. Epicures, beware!

:: 306 Paul’s Vanilla Wafers ::

2/3 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
2 tablespoons milk
1 1/4 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons vanilla

Cream the butter with an electric mixer. This is easiest if it’s at room temperature. (Or you can microwave it in 10 second bursts, on the lowest power level, until it’s soft.) Then add the sugar and remaining wet ingredients: well-beaten egg, milk, and vanilla.

Combine the other dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, salt) in a separate bowl, making sure that they are well sifted together. Mix dry into wet in a few, manageable amounts. At this point the wafer dough should be rather viscous.

Prepare the baking sheet(s) with a light application of non-stick cooking spray. Drop the dough by half-teaspoons onto the sheet. (Making the wafers any larger will result in a burnt bottom and under-cooked top.) Be sure to give the little buggers room to spread. Bake for approximately 10 minutes, or until the edges begin to brown. (You’ll get a feel for when they’re done after the first batch or two.)

The last time I made this recipe I used raw cane sugar, whole wheat flour, rice milk, and added some nutmeg and cinnamon. This resulted in ambiguously spiced alien pods rather than vanilla wafers. (The color was cool and the taste was okay, but they also had a weird texture.) This time I followed the recipe faithfully (save for adding more vanilla) and the wafers turned out as advertised. However, some might find the taste is lacking; after all, it is just butter, vanilla, sugar, and flour.

:: Bibliography ::

Harris, Jessie W., and Elisabeth Lacey Speer. Everyday Foods, edited by Alice F. Blood. (Publishing city unknown), (state unknown): Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941. Page 503.

P.S. Isn’t it awesome that the editor’s last name is Blood?

Honestly, it just isn’t that good of a horror film. Sure it has some very nice jump scares, but it also has some pretty pedestrian ones as well. And the plot! It’s about as formula they come.

Laura has a nebulous backstory involving a beautiful old house. Guess what? It’s an orphanage and she’s moving back in. Genius! Did I mention that her adoptive son has been talking to imaginary friends? Throw in a séance scenario complete with freaky medium, secret rooms, chronic illnesses, a twist ending, etc. and you’ve got a pretty good list of everything you can expect from this type of subgenre film. Come now, the only haunted house cliché they didn’t use was having the place built on an ancient Native American burial ground! And they couldn’t… because it takes place in Spain.

Truth be told, there are many redeeming aspects to the film. The art direction is interesting, and rarely appears too highly contrived. (Tomás’ sack mask and ‘little house’ are not too creepy, yet still evoke a feeling of foreboding.) Darkness/obstruction of vision isn’t used as a crutch to hide ghosts for a final, menacing appearance. (Tomás’ hallway walk was brilliant. Very well done.) The writer rarely sports with the audience’s intelligence. (Not explaining the Saint Anthony medal was a nice touch. No need to club the viewer with its significance.) Belén Rueda gave a solid performance as Laura. (Audiences never laughed at her - unintentional humor is becoming a huge problem in contemporary horror - and she never sublimated her character to the archetype of “mother”.)

My fundamental problem with the film is the wishy-washy ending. Just when you think director Juan Antonio Bayona and writer Sergio G. Sánchez are willing to destroy Laura and the audience utterly - and I do mean utterly! - with the twist, they backpedal. Instead of brining the story to a conclusion that indicts both mother/father/viewer for their neglect of children in their care - Laura’s focus on children with special needs rather than Simón, Carlos’ hands-off parenting, Benigna’s selfish revenge, our obsession with the spectral children rather than the endangered living child - The Orphanage tacks on a bunch of feel-good scenes for a speedy dénouement.

I’ve had to put an incisive, highly political post about Allegheny County taxes on the back burner because experimental pop siren Björk has attacked a newsperson… again! Hooray!

I love Björk. A lot. Like: ♥ ♥ ♥!!1! You may remember how her maternal instincts kicked in back in ‘96. (1996 if you happen to be reading this post in 2096, hahaha!) As the legend goes, Guðmundsdóttir went all WWF on a female reporter in the Don Muang Airport in Thailand when the woman was pestering her and her child. (Check out the video here for those of you who, like me, cannot resist the spectacle.)

This new event in the canon of Björklore also occurred in an airport: Auckland International. The ‘victim’ is Glenn Jeffrey, a photographer for The New Zealand Herald. He took a few pictures of Björk after her escort requested that he not. As Jeffrey walked away, “she came up behind me, grabbed the back of my black skivvy and tore it down the back.”

I’m sorry, but I would be ecstatic if Björk tore off my shirt in a fit of rage. (Check out The Herald’s article for an image of how much damage she did. Pretty good fillet of skivvy, that.) And I mean come on! She’s adorable. If her bodyguard asks you not to take her picture, tell him how you think it’s bizarre that “Who Is It” was left off Vespertine and that she owes you for the three year wait!

Having his shirt torn to ribbons by our favorite Icelander didn’t agree with Jeffrey. He’s vexed: “I don’t see being assaulted as I’m working as a press photographer as an acceptable thing. [...] If anybody assaults anybody you have the right to a legal recourse, whoever they are.”

What a whiner!

:: Bibliography ::

Vass, Beck. “Bjork assaults news photographer.” The New Zealand Herald, 14 January 2008. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10486682.

L’amour de l’étymologie is a feature exploring the etymology of English words. Today’s definition is mesmerism. You may occasionally find this noun capitalized, for reasons that will be made evident presently.

Mesmerism, unlike most words, is derived from a rather modern proper noun. Mesmer was the surname of an 18th Century Austrian physician, Friedrich Anton Mesmer. The -ism at the end was probably borrowed from the French word mesmérisme, which first appeared in print in 1973.

So what, exactly does this word mean? People often use it as a synonym for hypnosis, but they’d be wrong. (For derivative terms, like mesmerize, the conflation is often considered acceptable.) The Oxford English Dictionary defines Mesmerism as a chiefly historical word, which refers to “A therapeutic doctrine or system, first popularized by Mesmer, according to which a trained practitioner can induce a hypnotic state in a patient by the exercise of a force (called by Mesmer animal magnetism)”. It could also mean “[1] the process or practice of inducing such a state; [2] the state so induced, or [3] the force supposed to operate in inducing it.” (Brackets are mine.)

The adherent of Mesmerism, a mesmerizer, can use mesmerism (1) on a mesmerizee, using mesmerism (3) to induce a state of mesmerism (2). Nyuck!

In 1778 Mesmer relocated to Paris after other physicians in his homeland accused him of being a sham. Six years later, in 1784, Louis XVI of France commissioned a group of scientists to evaluate Mesmer’s claims. (One of which, if memory serves, included sitting in a bathtub full of metal filings.) Some of the top minds of the time participated in the evaluation, including Benjamin Franklin and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. Franklin is the first recorded English speaker to use the word in writing. In 1784 he wrote that “Some think it will put an End to Mesmerism.” I’d like to know what that  something was. But I guess it’s irrelevant: Despite there being no scientific grounds for Mesmer’s practices, they remained wildly popular into the late 18th and early 19th centuries. For example, Edward FitzGerald exclaimed in an 1889 letter than “Miss Martineau has been cured of an illness of five years by Mesmerism!”

However, it is true that one of the most hilariously insane and unspeakably dense humans was an anti-mesmerism crusader. Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the cult religion Christian Science, believed that mesmerism was real, but kinda evil. Go figure.

:: Bibliography ::

“Mesmerism.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2008. 11 Jan. 2008 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/findword?query_type=word&queryword=mesmerism&find.x=0&find.y=0&find=Find+word>

A large portion of my search engine traffic comes from people looking up the lyrics to “The Nun’s Litany”, a song from The Magnetic Fields’ new album, Distortion. (When I first posted about Distortion I was undecided about the album, despite really enjoying “The Nun’s Litany”. However, I followed Rich’s music mantra: listen to it until you like it. It worked!) So I figured, why not put an end to their fruitless search? Here are the lyrics as best I can make out. Please leave a comment with corrections (if you can understand them any better over all that shimmering music).

The Nun’s Litany

I want to be a Playboy’s bunny
I’d do whatever they asked me to
I’d meet people with lots of money
And they would love me like I loved you

I want to be a topless waitress
I want my mother to shed one tear
I’d throw away this old, sedate dress
Slip into something a tad more sheer

I want to be an artist’s model
An odalisque au naturel
I should be good at spin the bottle
While I’ve still got something left to sell

I want to be a cobra dancer
With little Willie between my thighs
I may not find a cure for cancer
But I’ll meet plenty of single guys

I want to be a brothel worker
I’ve always been treated like one
If I could be a back-street lurker
I’d make more money and have more fun

I want to be a dominatrix
Which isn’t like me, but I can dream
Learn S&M and all those gay tricks
And men will pay me to make them scream

I want to be a porno starlet
For that I’ll wait ’til Mama’s dead
I’ll see my name in lights of scarlet
And get to spend every day in bed

I want to be a tattooed lady
Dedicated as I am to art
Characters bold, complex and shady
Will write my memoirs across my heart

:: Bibliography ::

The Magnetic Fields. “The Nun’s Litany”. Distortion. Nonesuch Records: January 15, 2008.
(I know, the shame! I promise to buy the album when it comes out.)