The Austin Center for Photography has brought several big names to town for its Icons of Photography series. I’ve enjoyed all of them, and this week was no exception.

Lauren Greenfield has made name for herself as a professional photographer and is best known for her work examining the world of young people and most especially girls. As far as the advice she gave, it’s fair to call it more of a warning, a sign of what it means to grow up in these times in America.

Her book Girl Culture (the cover of which is shown in the above thumbnail) explores the way the body is the primary vehicle for expression in our society. Honestly, just go look at the pictures; they speak more eloquently than I do. (Some images NSFW.)

Women are reaching higher and higher levels of achievement in our society, yet still feel compelled to conform to culture that is sick in so many ways. Having a daughter navigate this jungle is going to be hell.

Girl Culture

That was then, this is now.

This week The New Yorker published a piece by Calvin Trillin trying to explain the appeal of this concoction. (The New Yorker Out Loud podcast has an interview/sample tasting with Trillin, too.) Poutine is now available across the U.S., mainly in hipster-filled restaurants.

First a few clarifications. Don’t get thrown off by the word “curd.” Just think cheese in little blocks. Not really all that flavorful, but it does the job. Gravy to those in the American heartland means white gravy, unless it’s Thanksgiving or there’s a pot roast involved. Here, gravy means brown, ostensibly of beefy birthright.

I feel like my entire culinary history has led me to this food. Let’s start with french fries. We’re raised on the stuff. From McDonald’s to, well, everywhere, fries are (for better or worse) America’s side dish. In Seattle, I had the pleasure of sampling this food at it’s finest. Frites on Capitol Hill did the Belgian style, straight from the motherland. (The secret is two rounds of frying.) They were served in a cone and were simply outrageous.

Now, let’s talk gravy. If you grew up in Amarillo, TX in the 80s and early 90s, Calico County was the “home style cooking” joint of choice. Besides great chicken friend steak and the slightly scary chicken fried corn on the cob, this place did something amazing with their fries. Behold, “Wets:” french fries covered in gravy. Yes, it was a heart stopper, but what food mentioned thus far isn’t? Seriously, amazing.

The concept of cheese on fries shouldn’t be new to anyone. A good plate of cheese fries with a side of ranch for dipping just screams Texas, doesn’t it? The Chicken Oil Company in College Station does them as well as anybody, and I’ve had my share. Now that Outback and Chili’s are serving them up, this dish doesn’t even raise any eyebrows.

All this leads us to poutine. We have the fries (Belgian style, hopefully), the cheese (partially melted) and a slathering of gravy. There’s now a joint in my neck of the woods serving this up. Frank, which specializes in fancy hot dogs and sausages, does a waffle fries version. I finally partook, and it wasn’t bad. Not the be all, end all, but worth the trip. Now, it’s just a matter of time until poutine completes the invasion and McDonald’s starts selling it. Don’t be shocked.

There’s a direct line leading to 2012. Let’s call it the Roland Emmerich-continuum. Remember that scene in ID4 when the White House gets all blowed up? Well, Rollie got hooked. He needed more and more. He tried to off the whole world in The Day After Tomorrow, but he couldn’t go all the way. He still had an itch that needed to be scratched.

Consider it scratched.

2012 is dumb as hell. Everything takes place in a “Saved at the last second” fashion, and false heroism rules the day. There all so many things that don’t make sense, but in the end, that’s fine. What’s important here is the destruction: beautiful, mind-numbing destruction. Emmerich lets his imagination go wild as a crack in the sidewalk turns into a broken house turns into a gaping maw in the earth. Highways and cities and mountains all fall before his mighty hand.

Here’s the catch: There’s no going back. With Independence Day, all that had to happen was a simple dispatchment of the aliens, and life could go back to normal. There is no normal after the events of 2012. The social-psychological ramifications of this are buried under a third-tier romantic subplot. We can’t be bothered with what comes next. Once the carnage ends, we’re outta there.

Even though I’ve seen several of his works over the years, I had never seen the man himself. Art:21, the PBS series about visual art in the 21st century, solved that problem.We’re introduced no only to the artist but to the machinery that produces his works. He comes up with the ideas, but then a small army executes the deliverance. He employees dozens of artists (presumably) to move his visions into the plane of material existence. (I love writing in art-speak.)

For all this, Koons creates some crazy stuff. Here’s a taste. More after the jump.

Michael Jackson and Bubbles

Yes, that’s a porcelain sculpture of the King of Pop and his monkey in gold and white. You can look at it all day long and still not be sure how it fits into any cogent worldview.

Bear and Policeman

In the episode, Koons refers to the “sexual” nature of this piece. Ostensibly, the Bear is holding the upper hand in a dangerous and possibly illegal relationship. I could see being scared by this piece. Don’t blow the whistle, Bear!

Ushering in Banality

This piece is included here just to point out that the little kid in the back is Jeff Koons. He placed this younger version of himself in the work, pushing forward the Pig of Progress or some such thing. Clap, clap. Brilliant.

Jeff Koons

For two years between 2005-2007, my wife and I lived right in the heart of Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood. After moving back to Austin, I still like to keep up with various Seattle news and notes. Imagine my surprise when I started to see articles like this. There’s a firebug on the loose. The three latest arsons have upped the total to 14 since the summer. Fourteen arsons! Most have been relatively small, but the big one happened a few weeks ago when a three-alarm fire burned down a foursome of business.

The blaze was started at the Green Bean Coffeehouse. I had been in this place a few times. It had a Christian vibe, which was very much not the norm in Seattle. There were posters illuminating the suffering going on around the world, and one time I overheard someone say that everyone who worked there was a volunteer. Turns out they were run by a church that met at the theatre next door. Seattle has a lot of coffee shops, but you hate to lose even one.

The great culinary loss in this fire was the Szechuan Bistro. I was weary of this place for a few months, but once I went, it was my go-to Chinese place in the neighborhood. Most of the dishes had some sort of spicy red Szechuan ingredient in them. I have no idea how authentic it was, but let’s just say my English wasn’t always understood first time around. I’ll miss you, Mongolian Beef. I hope you had insurance.

I’m always a sucker for nostalgia, but I didn’t think I’d be reminiscing about these places so soon. A felony or two has a way of moving things right along.

A map of the fires

The preceding is the intro to Bill Simmons’s podcast, which I listen to far more often than I read his columns. You see, Simmons writes long columns. LONG columns. Like 7000-word columns. I call this the Modest Mouse phenomenon. If they have a maximum 72 minutes on a CD, they’ll fill all 72 minutes. Maybe there’s only 40 minutes of good music, but hey, why not? Personally, I don’t have a problem with this. They’re going to charge the same amount anyway, so why not fill it up? I think Simmons has the same idea. He’s not constrained by print inches in a newspaper. There’s no 500-word limit. He could theoretically write forever. Here, I have a problem. I just don’t read long pieces online. I will sometimes print something out and read it later, but anything beyond one screen worth tests my patience, and I’ve never felt like printing anything related to sports.

I love the podcast though. He does them from his house, has a good selection of guests, and puts out several per week. I rarely miss one. Now, he has a new book. Sure, he’s promoted it a million times on his show, but I still took the bait.

The book (no surprise) is over 700 pages. No Limits Simmons strikes again! But again, I say, why not? I can alway choose to skip a chapter, and a couple of hundred pages in, I already have.

Simmons attempts to write his own history of the NBA in as comprehensive (and simultaneously anecdotal) way as possible. He spends the prologue giving us his testimony, if you will. How he got from there to here. Simmons is a notorious Boston homer (though not in a bad way) and the Celtics are number one on his list. He tells the story of his father getting season tickets back in the 70s and how that shaped his formative years. It’s the Sports Guy origin story. This is a nice way to start the book. It reminds me of the way Harry Knowles does his movie reviews at Ain’t It Cool News: The review is placed with a larger context: the other activities that took place that same day and such. Simmons history does the same thing. We need something to explain the mania that prompts someone to write a 700-page book about the NBA.

The first chapter is also well done. He talks about “The Secret,” the thing that leads to true success in the NBA. (Turns out it’s teamwork and unselfishness.) This gives us the lens through which the entire history of the league will be viewed. He follows that up with a chapter that I skipped, comparing Chamberlain to Russell. No, it’s more than that. It’s almost thirty pages of argument for Russell over Wilt. Alright, I get it. I don’t need convincing.

Before the fireworks start, Simmons gives us another great chapter taking us from the league’s beginning in 1946 up through the year 1984. You see, that is when the modern era of basketball starts according to Simmons, so he lays out all that came before. This is point at which I’m going to stop reading for a while because I don’t want to get burnt out on this book. When I step back into the fray, I’ll expect Simmons to walk me through the glory years, replete with Bird and Magic and MJ, as well as numerous references to Boogie Nights. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy

*The image of a Menudo Japanese import CD was only used because this is the kind of thing Simmons would appreciate. I’d hope that he’d also appreciate that this is my longest entry to date. It rubbed off.

As someone still new to cooking, I’m susceptible to false promises. Occasionally, I see a cookbook that looks like it might be the Holy Grail: detailed instructions, fancy but not too fancy, and as comprehensive as possible. When I saw Ad Hoc at Home, I thought I had nailed it. We’ve got Keller on the one hand, and “down home cooking” on the other. What could be better?

The book is now in my hands, and my initial review is mixed. I was lured in by promises of Chicken Pot Pie and Pineapple Upside Down Cake but shouldn’t have been surprised to see Braised Oxtail & Mushroom Tartine and Fig-Stuffed Roast Pork Loin. Heck, the word “verjus” comes into play three pages in. I have no idea what that is!

To get started, I’ve made an initial list of about a dozen things I’m going to try from this cookbook. I’ll need to be persistent if I’m going to make any headway. If that Chicken Pot Pie is as good as I think it’s going to be, that’s shouldn’t be a problem.

Ad Hoc at Home

The latest episode of This American Life explored infidelity. The most jarring part of the hour came at the beginning of Act II. Host Ira Glass, whose mother was a psychologist specializing in couples with an unfaithful partner, cited several statistics:

50% of couples will have one or both partners cheat. (Most are never detected.)

56% of men and 34% of women who cheat are happy in their marriage.

How do these figures jibe with my vitriol in paragraph one? Am I wishing hurt on a large segment of our society? Is it such a common occurrence as to change how we should feel about it? I suppose we all do things we regret, even though we know better. Human nature has its base side, but indulging that shouldn’t be a default. Infidelity is one temptation that hurts so many, so deeply that we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard. Go ahead and have too much cheesecake, and smoke a pack of Camels if you need to, but let this one err on the side of caution.

This American Life – Season One

The hit-you-over-the-head allegory is to Nazis and the Holocaust. That historical episode is about as depressing as it gets. The subplots all flow from there.

The Resistance: This is where we see the beautiful people fight the lizard people.

The Youth: Power is given to impetuous young people who in turn abuse their power and rat people out to the Visitors.

Inter-species love: Jungle fever gets a new meaning. Sexual attraction can permeate the human/reptile barrier. This is all well and good until labor and delivery. The results are terrifying. I wish I could unsee that lizard tongue shooting out of that baby’s mouth. But I can’t.

Honorable Defectors: Some Visitors know their species is up to no good and try to help. Thanks for nothing, skin jobs!

Vaccines: Yeah, I know, but seriously. The way the humans finally get the upper hand is to pollute the air with a chemical that kills only the Visitors. In order to survive in the Earth’s atmosphere, they must get regular injections, booster shots if you will.

Sympathizers. You gotta go along to get along. Some of the humans sell out to the Visitors when they see who’s winning the battle. Naturally, media and corporate types are well represented.

The new V looks to replace the Third Reich with Al Qaeda. There even looks to be a little They Live thrown in for good effect. This will surely affect some of these strands, but I bet most will survive intact. Without them, what kind of a remake would it be?

V – The Original TV Miniseries

While in college I, like most people my age, watched Loveline on MTV. I even got sucked into watching the first season of Celebrity Rehab. Sure, it was tawdry reality television, but it got very real, very fast. Addiction is intriguing, and I think part of the reason is its ubiquity and universality. A celeb junkie is dealing with the same things as a guy living on the streets. Addiction: the Great Equalizer®.

Now on Sex Rehab, Dr. Drew is exposing “the hidden addiction.” Eight celebrities of varying degrees of fame check into the Pasadena Recovery Center to deal with their addictions to sex in all its forms. I won’t get too graphic here, but the entire gamut of sexual experience is represented, from three-hour bubble-bath sessions to all-day computer porn jerk-a-thons.

It will surprise no one to learn that it’s not really about the sex. As one of the female inmates says through hot, salty tears, it’s about the inability to make connections with others. Irony alert: The most intimate experience a human can have is abused as a way to keep others at bay. They all just want to be loved, but their fornication keeps getting in the way!

I’m not sure I’ll stick with this show to its conclusion, but I might. Sadly, watching somebody deal with an addiction is about the only time we can see anyone on television be a real, reflective human being. That’s the unfortunate state of things in a world full of Bachelors and Biggest Losers.

Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, The Complete First Season