:(

A nice send-off from Corby Kummer.

A sad, sad day.

Lenny & Zoe

At the Precious premiere at the New York Film Festival. I’m excited to see the movie. Check out more red carpet fashions over at Jezebel.

Andrea Lee-Sarah Phillips

This is a passage from the final chapter, very soon after the main character’s father has died and she has returned home from Harvard. With her mother grieving, a swarm of old ladies that are described predictably as hen-like, rush in to take custodial duties of her home.

Food accompanies death in a very practical way. When a family is grieving, people will always bring them food as a measure of comfort, but also because on a practical level, grieving people often forget to eat. Then I think there is also the assumption that if they were left to cook, in their state it might mean some kind of kitchen disaster. I love how it’s styled here, first as an object, and then at the end, it acquires an emotional currency.

Every one of the old women brought food–glorious, near phantasmagorical food that piled up in the kitchen like a treasure from the Arabian Nights. It was the weighty southern food of my childhood holidays, but with a grandeur and ambitiousness to it that, on its own, established an occasion of high solemnity. Overflowing from the refrigerator onto the kitchen table and counters were a roast goose, a crown roast of pork, a couple of pheasants shot in Maryland by Deacon Leech, a corn pudding stuffed with oysters, glittering jars of homemade pickles and preserves, and desserts of all description, dominated by an oceanic rice pudding flavored with oranges, and mountainous chocolate poundcake covered with rum icing and dotted with pecans. Often in the days before the funeral I found myself creeping into the kitchen at odd hours when it was unguarded by the aged fairy godmothers of our household; all alone, I would greedily, frantically taste everything, as if I were on the track of a subtle flavor that continued to elude me.

When someone you love dies, if you are lucky, there are old ladies. First, they will cook for you. But also, they are acquainted with death, having seen it many times before, and living closer to it than you. They assure you that it is not the monster you think it is, that you have the joy of youth ahead of you, and that life goes on.

Derrion Albert

This breaks my heart in a million frustrated pieces every time I think about it. I watched the video, and if you haven’t, you should. Like the Neda video, it’s one of the few unmediated reminders of what true human violence looks like, and hopefully the closest you or I will ever get.

The really horrible thing that I keep going to with Albert is the manner in which he died. My feeling about being around guns is that people abuse them, they take them for granted, especially in violent areas. They shoot them, people get shot, and sometimes they can walk away without much of a feeling, a bullet lodged in an arm or a leg. Sometimes it hits a certain spot and you are gone, lights outs immediately. I don’t mean to demean gun violence. I fear it, certainly. Any gun violence is scary, and there is a whole other level of fear to living in places where shootings happen every day.

But think about being mobbed by dozens of kids, having them beat you repeatedly with 2-by-4-s, over and over. You are the smallest in the crowd, save for your friends, who are screaming with more terror in their voices than you have likely ever heard, for those other kids to stop. And they don’t. They keep going, they knock you to the ground, they kick you, and keep beating you with the 2-by-4-s. And then they stomp your head into the pavement. You are sixteen. I can not think of many more scary, more alone and horrifying ways to die. Sixteen.

That’s the type of thing that, as a parent, I imagine you would never get over, that your child died in complete fear.

I’m glad that Washington is going there.

I got Oprah chillin’ in the projects

I finally got around to watching this last night, and the generational divide is really striking. At one point, Oprah offers the fact that they both share rags-to-riches stories as a point commonality, maybe their only one. What’s not said is that they are both black, from poor backgrounds, and not so long ago, and perhaps under different circumstances they would be treated as the same. Whereas Jay-z gave Oprah, and implicitly viewers, a tour around the Marcy projects, one can imagine (and indeed I was expecting) Oprah to be doing some of the guiding as well. I could envision Oprah and Jay sitting on the stoop, sharing jokes about growing up in the ghetto, maybe sharing a couple elbow-jabs.

What actually happened is that Oprah and Jay set themselves on two sides of a divide, and arguably set up two divides, along generational lines, within the black community. I haven’t had a tv for awhile, but that’s not something I remember seeing often. Further, what’s amazing is that it was done implicitly, without an Al Sharpton or even a Kanye West announcing There are two Black Americas! but with subdued banter about hip hop, and with agreeing to disagree over the word nigger. Oprah. Agreeing to disagree. 

Additionally, did you get the feeling that Jay was nervous? He seemed like he was watching his pronunciation–I don’t think I heard one dropped consonant from him the whole time. Like he was on his best behavior.

The title of this post is from On To The Next One, a Swizz Beatz track off of Blueprint 3, and on a less serious note, it makes me wonder when this track was recorded, because the interview happened about a month before BP3 was released Sept. 11th. Maybe I’m just used to dealing in books because that production schedule seems a little down to the wire to me.

On repeat

Drake-Forever

I don’t understand where this came from. What is “More Than A Game”? A video game? Or just the soundtrack to LeBron James’s life? Is he saying his life is as exciting as a movie?

Please note:

1) “I run the world like Michelle’s husband” — I will be using this line

2) Eminem is making hate impossible.

3) Slaughterhouse.

Drake continues to look like my brother.

more about “Drake-Forever“, posted with vodpod

Molly Wizenberg-A Homemade Life

It is a rare delight when work reading approaches enjoyability levels of my pleasure reading. Such was the case with Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life. I bought it for research for a food blog-to-book proposal I’m considering, and made time in an awfully busy week to finish the entire thing. Wizenberg is the creator of Orangette, one of the first food blogs started in 2004, that is sadly not updated so much nowadays since Wizenberg and her husband opened their own restaurant in Seattle. As far as I can tell, the book collects some of the key posts from the blog (here is one, detailing the author’s wedding, that is basically re-presented in the book), recipes included, ordered according to twin narratives of the author’s father’s death from cancer, and meeting her husband through her blog. Both stories are heartbreaking in their own ways–the former just plain heartbreaking, the latter adorably so, I found myself crying at both–beautifully told by the author, and presented alongside great black-and-white illustrations. It’s not bookshelf quality, but overall an uplifting, thoroughly delicious read. Pick it up, read the blog.

Happy Sunday

It’s true,

I patrol YouTube for video of live performances of this song. Every few months I turn up a grainy recordings, usually snippets. None has come close to this in quality, and of course the music video has an appeal all its own that is separate than seeing her do it live. I am sad that I never got to see her perform back then, when she was in her prime, but I’m happy that she is still going at it.