Happy Chanuka!

Actually, it's not Chanuka-related, but here's the Emma Lazarus poem that's been in my head recently, especially since the news about Spain inviting back exiled Jews:

1492

Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate,
Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword,
The children of the prophets of the Lord,
Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate.
Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state,
The West refused them, and the East abhorred,
No anchorage the known world could afford,
Close-locked was every port, barred every gate.
Then smiling, thou unveil'dst, O two-faced year,
A virgin world where doors of sunset part,
Saying, "Ho, all who weary, enter here!
There falls each ancient barrier that the art
Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear
Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!"

Obviously problematic, of course, to refer to America as a "virgin world" and celebrate without criticism the European advent upon these shores. But I love the concept of a year as two-faced, and I love the reminder of what the US has represented sometimes, for some people, when it is its best self. Or, at least, of what the US should aspire to be. This sonnet also pairs really nicely with The New Colossus.

I also like to claim Emma Lazarus as a secularist, and she was definitely a Socialist. She herself is always paired - possibly due to name primarily - in my head with Emma Goldman, another Jewish woman I really admire and a community-spirited anarchist whose name seems never to have been exactly cleared.

Back to Chanuka, though, I've been thinking all year about more progressive ways of understanding a holiday that glorifies a small group of radically conservative religious zealots who murdered their secular brethren as readily as their sort-of-oppressive governors. Tonight I've thought of lighting each candle for a different aspect of the admittedly complex story - one for the secular Jews murdered by the Maccabees, one for the Jews killed fighting for what they saw as the right to practice their own heritage, one for the Greeks (many of them friendly with and welcoming of Jews) killed by the Maccabees, and then one for people nowadays not permitted to practice their own culture, and one for people nowadays not permitted by be secular, modern, free of religious oppression.

Of course, I don't know what I would do on night 8. I'm out of candle ideas. And it's all a little Pesakh-y. But I kind of like it!

I wish there were a song that tackled historical Chanuka, and what hope we can draw from it. (Does that mean I have to write one now?) Laoz Tzur/Rock of Ages is so beautiful musically (I've been telling Alex that if his caroling company needs more Chanuka songs - since all they have is Dreidl, Oh Chanuka, and some stupid carol about Chanuka lights, and so they run out of songs really fast whenever they sing around Jews - that would be a great one, right up the carol-arrangement alley), but the words are SO warmongering, martyr-y, dependent on divine aid (and retribution), ahistorical, etc. etc., it's hard to listen to. Maybe that one's due for a rewrite?

In the meantime, I'm listening to the Wailin' Jennys instead.

And Pentatonix's new arrangements of a few Christmas carols, because I love tight harmonies more than I hate Christmas carols! On that subject, I saw Pentatonix's free show at the Verizon Store in Grand Central yesterday, which was awesome, and got to meet/hug/take a picture with them and get a signed poster! Cool. So today, re-excited about them, I went and picked up tickets for Alex and me for their spring tour show in February. $25 I probably should have hung on to, but they will bring me enough joy that it's worth it!

I know I always say this, but I really do mean to post more often... we'll see how long before the next one! In the meantime, happy Chanuka!

Emancipation and Pasta

So last night was great. Katie and Faye and I grabbed soul food at Manna's on 134th and Malcolm X, which I'd been craving for some time. Mac and cheese, collard greens, truly amazing candied yams (and I do not like my yams candied), mashed potatoes, bread pudding, plantains. Yum!

Then we went and saw the Emancipation Proclamation Exhibition at the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture. It was really good. The exhibition was pretty simple, in a small room, and it pretty much consisted of the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, a later draft on vellum, on the other side of the room a typewritten first draft of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 100-year anniversary Emancipation Proclamation speech (with his edits on it in turquoise ink!), and some explanatory panels. But the panels were thorough and detailed, a good brief refresher on the events surrounding emancipation and then a quick journey through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Civil Rights, and post-Civil Rights challenges for blacks and others who still face systemic oppression (p.s. I love that museums will come right out and say things that are true, without equivocating or doing that thing the media does where they include viewpoints that are wrong in order to be balanced). And seeing the Emancipation Proclamation, written in Lincoln's hand, with bits copy-pasted in from a previous speech published in the newspaper, with caret-ed in edits, was just amazing, as was seeing the bits of MLK's draft and editing process. It only took half an hour to view the whole exhibit, but it was moving, educational, and totally rewarding.

In other news, round challah drizzled with honey, for a sweet and round new year!

Can anybody tell me what exactly would make a year round,

and why that is desirable?

I made it into French toast today, and that was great, although I think I actually still prefer my French toast from sourdough; it makes the flavor more interesting and vibrant.

Also I made salted caramel ice cream with salted caramel praline, and threw in leftover frozen bits of homemade cinnamon pecan roll, and it's delicious although too salty because when I halved the recipe I forgot to halve the salt. But I would make it again, with the correct amount of salt, and I can already tell it's an amazing recipe! (Recipe can be found here, btw. David Lebovitz is so great.)

Leftover giant upside-down cinnamon pecan roll.

These are a big pain,

even if you're in the habit of making bread,

but SO DELICIOUS.

Also, about a month ago I made pasta for the first time! I had like 18 egg yolks leftover from all the macarons for my tea party, and the pasta dough alone used up 7 of them. What a hilarious, pain-in-the-ass, kind of fun, ultimately delicious process!

You really do make a well of flour 

and throw the eggs and other ingredients in it,

and then...

Stir it up with your fingers! 

For a really long time. 

Until it turns into... 

This! And you incorporate the rest of the flour with a pastry cutter!

Eventually you get a ball of pasta dough! 

It is very important to pose prettily

as you grate parmesan for the alfredo sauce. 

It is also very important to wear your

original French chef hat

from New Orleans. 

After the dough chills in the fridge,

you roll it out AS THIN AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN,

which is difficult and not really that thin,

and then pizza cut it into

fettucine heaven! 

Success! 

Lots of cheese and more egg yolks for the sauce! 

Scrumptious homemade pasta,

and I am ten egg yolks down!

I also made tapioca pudding (which I thought I liked, but blech, I need to toss it), green tea shortbread cookies, and ice cream with the remaining yolks. A good food month!

A Chock-Full Summer's End

I have done so many fun things since I last posted in July!

Here are some of them:

Faye, Katie, Alex, and I went (at Katie's instigation) to a Jazz Age party on Governor's Island! Actually, first we accidentally went to the Jazz Age party on Governor's Island the weekend before it happened, and were confused but ended up having a lovely day in the sun, picnicking on a bench looking out at boats between Staten Island and Brooklyn, swinging in the grassy area at the end of the island, and eating chocolate cake under the trees. But then the next weekend we went to the Jazz Age party, and it was very fun also! None of us but Faye had appropriate Jazz Age attire (not having been doing promotional parties for The Diviners), but it we felt festive anyway. Alex and I ate leftover homemade mac and cheese and also macarons; Faye and Katie bought some Jazz Age food! There was live music interspersed with some amateur but very cute acts, and I made Alex dance with me on the dance floor!

I did not take this picture; 

I found it by Googling "Jazz Age party Governors Island 2012"

Also I recently had a late birthday tea party, for which I made (with lots of help!) crustless white bread chicken salad sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches, scones, and five kinds of macarons with mixed fillings!

 I made macarons in all the colors!

 Green macarons = a sink full of green

 Pre-macaronage, 

it looks like the meringue and the almond flour 

will never combine!

 Alex arranged them so beautifully.

The green ones are pecan.

The blue ones are peanut.

The pink ones are plain.

The brown ones, some are chocolate and some are espresso!

Petit fours!

Edlyn came with creme brulee doughnuts, and Katie brought a beautiful and delicious chocolate cake from the bakery around the corner!

A bunch of friends got together to give me a great, great gift - a basket of ingredients! And it's good for them, too, because now I can make them more dessert :)

So many amazing ingredients!

We all were dressed up and ate delicately while trading thinly veiled insults, and then we watched The Secret Garden, which no one else had seen. I love that movie a lot.

Also, Alex and I have been subway stopping a couple times! We're still on the 6, but we're finally up in the Bronx, which is great because now I've actually been to all five boroughs. On our last stop in Manhattan (125th St.), we wandered out as close to the water as we could get, eventually stopping at a playground next to the freeway (it might have been the intersection of FDR Drive and the Triborough Bridge), where we admired a mural about the perils of dope. Between our first and second stops in the Bronx (we got out at 3rd Ave./138th St. and then wandered a little but mostly just walked to Brook Ave.) we grabbed food at a Caribbean place (I don't remember which island), which was acceptably tasty but nothing to write home about (not like that awesome sandwich I got around 116th or 120th, the time before!), and then we boarded the subway at Brook and went home. Then about two weeks ago we continued the exploration, managing six stops in one trip. We got off at Cypress and walked as far out toward the water as we could go, through a pretty ugly industrial area, and then north along Bruckner to go back underground at E. 143rd St. Off the train again one stop later at 149th, then cut diagonally along Prospect Ave. to see a little more of the neighborhood (it mostly looked poor/working class but well cared for, although there was one block on which on one side of the street the houses were fenced off and very well cared for, and on the other side they were falling apart, totally dilapidated. That was weird, especially as they appeared to have started out similarly constructed) before heading east again to go underground at Longwood. Again one stop, to Hunts Point Ave., where we were not able to look at the neighborhood map due to a domestic dispute (and police officer) right in front of it, so it was actually somewhat fortunate that we were able to figure out our crooked way to the next stop at Whitlock (finally above ground!). That one was an especially cool walk, though, through a pretty hoppin' downtown area and a few cute residential blocks. Next up we'll cross the Bronx River, and we only have 10 stops (two trips, I would think) to finish out the 6 line and make it to Pelham Bay Park, which I have always wanted to explore! Ah, progress!

Yesterday a bunch of us grabbed conveyor belt sushi (I had never had conveyor belt sushi! It is so fun!) and then karaoke'd for two hours (ack!) before returning home to watch the 49ers crush the Lions, which was awesome. In other news from the last couple months, I had a great time at J-West in early August; I'm finally reading Melina Marchetta; I'm about to start work on Bye Bye Birdie, Footloose, and a Seussical revue; Jamie is finally back and threw a really great barbeque followed by an awesome girls' night at her new place with Alf; I already miss summer weather even though in New York it's pretty terrible; Skye is staying with us during her break from tour, which is delightful; we have a new long-term subletter beginning in November but still need someone for the month of October; I LOVE LOVE LOVE my new mattress (well, new as of Memorial Day, but I was gone for a month and didn't get to fully appreciate it), and I am having a lovely and reflective Rosh Hashanah. Also, Alex and I have been cooking up a storm, and I have been having adventures with house plants - more on that next time! Now to go post that subletter ad and get ready for work! (And the looooooooong commute....)

In Which I Am Now a Voice Actor, and So Is Alex!

Yesterday, I recorded a radio spot! Amazing!

Basically, Libba Bray is publishing this awesome-sounding new book, The Diviners, and they're creating these radio spots that are basically scripts abridged from early scenes in the book (if you "like" the facebook page, you can read the first few chapters), so Faye was helping look for actors to record the voices. Fortunately, the actors she knows are us!

So Alex and I got gigged on to do these spots, and yesterday we showed up at the studio to record. I did the voice of Evie in the first scene when she gets to her uncle's place; Alex did a magnificent job voicing first the douchey, rich, young man who gets freaked out by a Ouija board at a party, and then the staid Jericho, assistant museum curator. It was so much fun! Evie was kind of hard for me, because she's a flippant, flirtatious flapper (OH YEAH I JUST DID!), outgoing and a party girl - basically the opposite of me. If I knew how to do a flirtatious tone, I would have been employing it for years, eh? But it worked out - it only took two takes plus one more for extra, and then in like five minutes Libba and the producer were able to patch together the best of Alex's and my line readings into one smooth spot.

So how cool is all that?!? (They paid us, too.) I don't know when/where they'll be - aired? published? I don't know what you call it - but I'll be sure to let y'all know! Anyway, now I want to do voice work all the time, because it was so freaking great! The end.

When I Am Rich

I will buy all of the jars of honey that look intriguing to me, no matter how expensive! I will probably have ten kinds of honey at a time, which is not minimalist at all, but which I will really enjoy!

In Which I Get Hit by a Banana

I have done some fun things since I got back from California on Sunday!

I was totally wiped when I got in, especially as the plane landed an hour late and then it took another 45 minutes to get my baggage due to a carousel mix-up. I took a cab home, took a shower and a nap, ate dinner and chatted with Faye and Katie, and then went straight to bed, as I reported to camp in New Jersey first thing Monday morning! It was an intimidating week of lots of commute and early every day work coming after a week of dress rehearsals and Winnie the Pooh performances and travel, but I made it and had a good time! Mainly by forcing myself to go to bed by 9 every night (well, 9:30-10, more realistically).

So on Tuesday I went to a book event at Books of Wonder; Kristin Cashore, Melina Marchetta, and Gayle Forman were on a panel asking each other questions, which was very fun. Of all the books by all those authors, I had only read Fire by Cashore (which I liked but didn't love), though of course Faye has been telling me to read Marchetta since the day I met her. Well, I'll tell you: The panel inspired me, apparently! The next morning I picked up Graceling, which had been sitting in my house since November and which even Alex had read before me and really liked. I had picked it up once before, read ten pages, and thought it was stupid - and now I can't even tell why! Because I read it in one day, because it was magnificent. And then I made Faye lend me Bitterblue ASAP, and read that in a day and a half. If you're interested, my reviews on Goodreads are here and here, but the summary is, they're basically my favorite thing since Tamora Pierce. Which is what every review I've ever read of them has said, so no points for originality Shoshana - and they're not even that similar to anything in the Pierce canon, and they're maybe targeted a little older, but they just give me some similar feelings.

Anyway, I lay fairly low until Friday, as I was still trying to get enough rest in to make it through the week. But on Friday afternoon, I went straight from work to karaoke with Katie and Faye and other people in publishing (mainly Katie's coworkers at Soho, it looked like), which was fun. Karaoke is still fairly new to me, and I'm still not sure how I feel about it, but it is growing on me some! Emily came by too, and I haven't seen her in ages, and then we all trekked back to Renselaus/Pemberley (the name of that apartment across the street from me appears to be in transition), played a little Mao (I made some very good rules! I like this game and no one ever wants to play, so it was very fun for me!), and then went to an Irish bar (is there any other kind in Sunnyside?) up on 46th to hang out and listen to some Irish music, which was totally great.

And then yesterday, after FYA book club, which is always way more fun than I even remember, and after browsing the farmers' market, which was magnificent and bigger than I've ever seen it and I can't wait to actually do some grocery shopping, I met up with Edlyn for a show called You Art What You Eat at Slap Dash. This was a hilarious experience. Also a cool one, but primarily hilarious.

This bit of Crown Heights appears to be at that early stage of gentrification that's actually really cool, with a dramatic variety of businesses from cheap unisex haircut places and cheap but potentially delicious restaurants that have been there forever to a brand new (and utterly delicious) gelateria. You know, the stage before long-time residents can no longer afford to live there (and neither can the artists who were the forefront) and their communities get broken up and big box stores start moving in and kicking out the interesting little businesses both old and new. Anyway, the point is, I was enjoying it for now at least!

And then there was the actual show. First I had some free refreshment, aka a vegan low salt low fat cholesterol free whole grain mini doughnut, which was better than I expected but not, you know, something I would ever actually eat again. Maybe that gives you an idea of what this crowd was like. Throughout the first act, a piece of art played on a projection screen behind the presenters: an 11-second loop made on a scanner of a person playing with cotton candy. During this act we had a shy and sing-songy reading of a personal essay about Montana and eating cherries, which was actually well-written, I think, but it needed a better reader or I needed to have it on paper in front of me. Then we got a reading of a story - which (this was too good) has now become part of the novel this guy is working on, called City of Princes - which again was actually pretty good. So some of these pieces were surpassing the expectations I had developed upon arrival, which was cool.

The first intermission was then followed by a very strange piece during which a guy threw bananas at us, ate bananas very quickly, and shouted a bit, all underscored by songs that mention bananas. I myself got hit by a banana, which I quickly slid into my purse, since bananas were on my shopping list and now I guess they're not (in fact, I already had a banana in my purse, which I had purchased at a coffee shop only an hour before!). Still, though this banana piece was bizarre, it was actually quite entertaining. It was followed by a neat video called Grub by none other than Jeff Stark - a montage of freegans prepping and eating food and washing their dishes. And actually, I am kind of interested in freeganism and I might go to the Grub community dinner sometime and help cook! At any rate, the freegan video was followed by a video called Taco Monday, which seemed to be primarily hand drawings of tacos coming out of other things, with supporting roles filled by hot dogs, remote controls, middle fingers, and chicken legs. I have to admit, that one seemed kind of stupid to me, but I was probably just not the right audience.

After the second intermission was an audio presentation of a recording of a guy's very intense sleeptalking, which made me uncomfortable. Also, there was a PowerPoint about beekeeping, which was great, because I freaking love all the kinds of honey ever! I think there are probably 8 different kinds of honey in my apartment right now, and while I can't take credit for it all (I'm gonna guess that there are four of mine and four of Jamie's), I definitely appreciate it!

And then I went home and the train was very slow and then I went to bed. And now it is today and I will hang around here and get shit done and maybe help them paint over at Renselaus-will-soon-be-Pemberley. See ya!

Three Songs

So one great thing about being in California is driving, because the great thing about driving is that I listen to the radio, and learn new songs! Here are the three new songs that I learned listening to the radio while driving in California for the last month - well, the ones that stuck.




Well, technically Ya'el introduced me to "Little Talks," but then I promptly heard it about 50 times on the radio! I haven't listened to any other Of Monsters and Men yet, but I want to.




I haven't watched this music video yet (although I have read a description of it!), but the song caught my attention immediately when I first heard it on KFOG. It's the rare sad ballad that doesn't strike me as boring, overwrought, and/or sentimental, which makes it class A in my book! (not in a drug sense) (and unlike his other hit, "Lego House," which I had to turn off in the middle)




I liked this song a LOT and IMMEDIATELY, but it took me three listens to figure out most of the chorus lyrics... which completely shocked me when the words finally registered! I had been thinking, "what a nice fun song about running!" Obviously, this required some reevaluating. But disturbing as it is, I still really really like it. Too bad I don't love any of Foster the People's other stuff (of the 7 or so songs I've listened to), although "Don't Stop" is ok. Somehow all the rootless elements going on in their other songs really click here.

So that was my California summer in music! (Plus the song I wrote on the way back from SLO, but I don't know yet if it's any good.) Now I'm back in New York, starting up camps in New Jersey at Porch Light, beating the heat, scrubbing the bathroom, borrowing Melting Stones from Katie, memorizing some poetry, thinking about hosting a tea party for my birthday (fancy tea! fancy tea party dresses! watercress sandwiches! macarons sandwiched with ice cream in honor of the hot summer! scones! maybe I'll finally get my act together and make some clotted cream!), gearing up for J-West... blahdidy blah, life as usual :)

Hopefully I'll be better about blogging this month! Fingers crossed, eh?