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 I was really, really excited to read Lucy Knisley’s Relish. I’ve been a fan of her web presence for a pretty long time. I think her art is really sweet and I think she makes funny, touching observations and, though I have rarely experienced the things she writes about, they’re no less relatable or interesting.
Unfortunately, Relish didn’t feel like her autobiographical webcomic Stop Paying Attention. Perhaps it is a problem exclusive to her books — I haven’t yet read French Milk — but the whole of Relish felt pretentious and pompous and snooty. (I know those are basically synonyms but it deserves all three — “pretentious” for her superiority complex, “pompous” for the near-explicit sense of “anyone who doesn’t eat like me is unworthy” and “snooty” for her constant need to point out that cheap, quick food is “bad” even when she is talking about how much she likes it.
I know this is autobiography and I know that autobiographies are a very tight lens through which to see and express the world and I know that it can sometimes make for a very limited scope, but I would have loved to see adult Lucy perhaps realizing that the way she grew up and her relationship with food is a highly, highly privileged one.
Food is a political issue and it will remain a political issue until all people have access to high quality food that they can afford and I believe it to be a genuine failure on Knisley’s part to never in the entire scope of the book address that. She takes the time to let her readers know that she liked McDonald’s even though it’s “considered cheap and unhealthy” and in the same page devotes a panel to fat people picketing McDonald’s for making them fat, but never addresses any of the systematic issues that bar access to good, nutritious, fresh food for great swaths of human beings across the globe.
As a fat person, this is what Lucy Knisley thinks of me. Wonderful.Politicization of food aside, I wanted to like Relish, I really really did. The art is fun and I particularly like Knisley’s rendering of place — there’s an overhead rendering from the section about her childhood trip to Mexico that I find particularly charming and I love almost every illustration of shop fronts — and I think her illustrated recipes are legit wonderful. I enjoyed the tale of the lemonade chicken and how much she appreciates sharing a meal with another person, but I spent an enormous amount of my time reading rolling my eyes and groaning. There is some gentle, but still icky othering of food she experiences while traveling that I did not enjoy, but more than that I just couldn’t stomach the pomposity of it all.
Food is wonderful and I mean that really and truly. I love to cook and I love to shop for fresh vegetables and choose the perfect piece of meat to barbecue. I love gourmet meals prepared by master chefs and a perfectly constructed Big Mac. I love to share meals with people I love and I love falling in love with people over shared meals. I feel like, at our cores, Lucy Knisley and I are probably not that different about food.
But it seems very likely that Lucy Knisley has never been one of the 2.3 million households in the United States that live in a food desert. She has likely never paid $9 a pound for defrosted “fresh” chicken. She has probably never skipped a meal so that someone else in her household could eat. And though I do not expect her — nor anyone — to apologize for the privilege of being able to eat not only regularly, but incredibly well, I do expect her to acknowledge it. How can you spend so many pages talking about the unbelievable richness and joy of your food experience and not acknowledge how lucky you are to have had it?
So, though Relish was not for me, I decided to trust Knisley’s skills and tastebuds anyway and make carbonara for my family following her recipe. Mostly.
 I am not a person who follows recipes well which has often led to genuinely grotesque meals and has taught me to avoid baking at pretty much all costs — I’m an experimenter! I like to add and subtract and never measure anything! Those are not skills for baking or recipes! — so I made sure to keep a copy of Knisley’s recipe right at hand and also to read it about a dozen times and also make my girlfriend gather all of the ingredients because she is much more meticulous than I am in the kitchen.
 We live on a strict-ish budget so the only thing I bought special was thick cut bacon (The wilds of North Dakota are not prime pancetta territory, tragically.) which means that we went without the wine (I have learned from experience that the Moscato we drink is way too sweet to cook with.), used lots of parmesan because we didn’t have any romano on hand, and used dried parsley because we are notoriously bad at not letting leftover herbs go to waste. Also, once the garlic was soft and golden and delicious, I smashed it up and added it to the egg mixture because… well, why wouldn’t you? It’s garlic.
Though I am atrociously bad at recipes, I am a better than average cook so once everything was ready and organized and sorted into little bowls like the pros do on the TV, it went super easy. Even though I was worried the illustrative nature of it might mess with me, Knisley’s recipe was not at all hard to follow.
 We decided to heat up our peas on the side and then dump them over the top of the pasta servings partly because it looked super pretty and partly because my mom doesn’t like the frozen peas we buy because they have a sort of stiff inner texture — they’re very meaty, basically — and then we sat down and everyone proceeded to stuff themselves to the point of wishing we were dead or maybe napping for a super extended period of time.
 I cannot emphasize how good this was, for real. With four people eating one of our usual pasta meals, we leave behind enough for a couple of lunch servings. This time, with only three people eating, there was nothing left in that big silver bowl when we were done.
So maybe, as a reading experience, Relish wasn’t for me and perhaps I have some serious qualms about un-broached social issues in it, but as a cookbook I have at least one great recipe — my girlfriend and I have already talked about making this again but adding onions and mushrooms and swapping peas for asparagus — and high, high hopes for the few others Knisley illustrated.
I might think twice before I buy more of Knisley’s autobiographical work, but I’ll certainly be first in line if she finds herself compelled toward an entire illustrated cookbook.
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… he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath. |
The Round House was seriously, unbelievably good and I might have a couple things to say about it! Spoilers! » more: the round house by louise erdrich
 Live Through this was released on April 12, 1994. I was nine years old and just about to finish out third grade at a new school. I was tall for my age, fat, smart, and already just a little bit angry at the world around me. I’d started my school year at a brand new school and my big sister had just moved out of our house. I was just starting to become someone and music was the thing — the thing I loved first, the thing I loved before books or movies or television — that was helping to make that person.
Nineteen years later, I am twenty-eight years old and just about to finish up my first year in a new state. I’m no longer tall for my age, but I am still fat and smart(ish). Music is still the first thing I ever really loved, but I’m in a serious relationship with television at the moment. My idea of what “someone” is has changed dramatically and I’m okay with how I turned out most days.
Nine years old seems insanely young to me now, impossibly young — too young for Hole probably, too young for anything, honestly. But I grew up with wonderful, involved but permissive parents and KROQ and the Los Angeles alt-radio culture of the mid-90s, so young or not, I first found my footing as a human being in Green Day and Candlebox and Nirvana and Tori Amos and The Offspring and Alanis Morrissette and Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. And Hole.
 I remember standing in my bedroom screaming into the handle of a sponge mop to every single song on Live Through This. I remember scrawling lyrics out on binder covers and backpacks. I remember listening to it in the dark with my best friend Marian. I remember burning candles and shadowing my eyes with black eyeshadow and slicking my mouth with red Wet & Wild lipstick and screaming those songs like the words were being exorcised from me, like I’d die if I left them in for too long. I remember staring at that album cover, at young and barefoot and probably-not-all-that-far-from-my-age-at-the-time and still kind of unbelievably cool Courtney Love on the back. I remember the cracks in the plastic CD case.
I remember being angry — so angry — at so much, at everything. Angry at nine and at twelve and at fifteen and at twenty. Angry at myself for being fat and weird. Angry at the kids who were mean to me and at myself for being impossibly meaner back. Angry at the people who didn’t listen when I was hurting, angry at myself for getting hurt, for letting other people hurt me. Angry at the world in the most uncomplicated ways, the most individual. I was angry because I was hurt.
 I remember.
I couldn’t have told you in 1994 when I bought it on cassette at Tower Records at the West Covina Plaza or a couple years later when I bought it on CD at the same Tower Records or a year after that when I had to rebuy it because I’d worn my first copy out or when I rebought it digitally because I couldn’t take the skips from my ripped copy any longer — I’d have probably just said I liked it a lot because Green Day was my favorite band and I would’ve felt like a traitor — but Live Through This was the most important album of my youth. And nineteen years later it means more to me than ever.
I didn’t call myself a feminist in 1994, partially because I was nine years old and I didn’t really know what that meant and partially because I was raised by a father who called feminists “feminazis” and if there was one thing I wouldn’t have wanted to do in 1994, it was disappoint my father. I didn’t call myself a feminist in 2004 either because I was raised by a culture that taught me that feminism meant female superiority and that I should strive for something my conservative poli-sci professor called “equalism” but was actually code for the patriarchal bullshit status quo. I call myself a feminist now and I try very hard to be a good one, an intersectional one, an engaged one.
But I’m also angry. Still angry, so angry. And where my anger was indistinct and personal when I was young, anger built on hurt and sadness, it is anger directed at the system now, at patriarchy and rape culture and misogyny. At the incredible violence women face, institutional and political and personal.
Before I really knew why I was angry, Hole gave me a voice for it. Before I understood what it meant when a boy with a blond bowl cut chased me and my best friend around the playground at my first elementary school and flipped our skirts up, laughing, I was angry. Before I understood why a yard aid pulled me aside and told me not to play on the monkey bars because my shirt was “too short” and everyone was looking, I was angry. Before I saw the aggressive challenges from boys in high school because “girls don’t like metal” as acts of sexism, I was angry. And even though I didn’t really know it, Courtney Love was shaping that anger, asking questions that I wouldn’t understand for years, and planting the furious seeds of something that would shape me monumentally as an adult.
As an adult, that anger raged, rages through me every day. Every time I see another woman sliced open on a television or movie screen. Every time I’ve been groped or catcalled or hit on through the open windows of my vehicle. Every story I hear about street harrassment. Every time a politician thinks they have a right to make rules about what people can or cannot do with their uteruses. Every single time I’ve heard “Nice tits” or “That mouth would look great around my dick” or “You’re fat but I’d still fuck you.” Every story about assault or rape or abuse.
 Every time I remember the world I live in as a woman, the world the women I love have to live in, the world every woman has to live in, I’m angry. So angry. And at nine, at twelve, at fifteen, and nineteen, and twenty-two, and twenty-eight, I was angry and, even when I didn’t understand the forces behind the objects of my fury, Hole was there to give that fury voice and shape and color and direction. Courtney Love was there. Nineteen years later, she is no longer the sole voice of my anger, but she’s still there, familiar, always and eternal, and for that I will be forever grateful.
 We have to be more than the world would make us.
The Eleventh Plague was pretty decent! And I might have a couple things to say about it! Spoilers! » more: the eleventh plague by jeff hirsch
Hi, I’m Ash and I’m a DVR hoarder.
For as long as I’ve had access to a DVR (years and years, now) I’ve saved shows and movies like they might later save my life. Half hour comedies, one hour dramas, whatever movies happened to interest me on all those expensive premium movie channels. All of it. I save and I save and I save and I watch that available storage space bar disappear and I get more and more tense, awaiting the day that I’ll have to cull the herd in order to let my recording habit survive.
The culling isn’t hard, not at all really. By the time it arrives, I’m so disconnected from the things I’ve recorded that I no longer have any real need to keep them around. The movies and special recordings go first, then anything canceled, then anything that might constitute a mini-series type situation. There’s a thrill to deleting, a cleansing rush. “I am no longer obligated to watch or care about that thing,” I think. “I’m free.”
But then the potential regret. “I really wanted to see that movie, didn’t I?” and “A lot of people said John Carter was really good!” and “But you really do want to watch The Newsroom!”
I struggle with my hoarding because the line between save and delete is fine, baby’s hair fine, finer than, like, the breath of a ghost. There’s no rhyme or reason to it and I probably couldn’t explain it if asked. “That show feels better than that show.” or “I’ll feel bad for that one if I delete it.” My decisions are irrational and meaningless, but I am capable of making them swiftly.
The other day, in a preventative move against a future shouting match over the lack of disk space on the communal DVR, I went to work. I got rid of the awards shows that my dad neither watches nor cares about, but somehow always sets to record. “Peace out, Grammys,” I said. “Smell ya later, Golden Globes.” I cleaned off a couple dumb things I’d recorded to show my girlfriend and then forgotten to delete because no, I don’t need to keep an episode of House Hunters that I recorded in November. Then I got to USA’s show from last summer Political Animals.
 I thought, “Meh, I’ll delete that one. It’s just a mini-series!”
But I was feeling lazy and I didn’t particularly want to get off the couch, so instead of deleting those last four episodes, I sat there and watched them all. And how glad am I that I did?!
What a good show! What a good thing! Even with all of its issues — it’s lacking in characters of color (Though there are some present, none are really leads, and Brittany Ishibashi is severely underutilized.) and it has a particularly difficult time dealing with women which is frustrating because it’s a show about an incredibly smart, powerful woman featuring several smart, powerful, engaging female characters and yet there are still heinously catty interactions between female characters, poor handling of complicated relationships (Carla Gugino’s relationship with her boss/boyfriend could’ve been great, but they fumbled her terribly.) and women insulting men by comparing them to women/girls — it was a fun, engaging, and emotional experience!
It’s got all kinds of smart people talking quickly and authoritatively about politics and journalism and it’s got that sort of fun and witty political drama element and it’s got good looking people and likable people and beautiful, heartbreaking family relationships and it was just super satisfying.
 It’s got a seriously compelling, evolving relationship between Sigourney Weaver’s Secretary of State and Carla Gugino’s DC Journalist.
 It’s got (G-O-R-G-E-O-U-S) fraternal twin brothers (James Wolk and Sebastian Stan) where one is the fuck-up and one can do no wrong but they love each other anyway!
 It’s got Ellen Burstyn as the feisty drunk grandma who is the constant, sassy voice of reason and support! (And a WONDERFUL relationship between her and Sebastian Stan’s character, oh man.)
 It’s got a womanizing, cheating former president dad who, despite his massive failures as a human, really loves his family and his ex-wife.
 It’s got the sassy grandmother and the perfect brother’s uptight fiancee smoking pot in the Secretary of State’s kitchen and bonding!
 It’s got an impromptu elopement which the entire overbearing (WITH LOVE) family manages to crash during the single most dramatic/shocking event of the presidential term. An event that made me sob! But I won’t spoil because it was so much better not knowing it was going to happen.
 And it’s got Sigourney Weaver playing a Hillary Clinton-esque badass and playing her with wit and humanity and tenderness and palpable concern for her family. If there’s one thing I left this show with it’s that Elaine Barrish is not to be fucked with.
Sadly, USA pulled their full episodes from their video hub and OnDemand, so the only place to watch the show legally is by buying episodes through Amazon but, you know, if you’ve got a space twelve bucks sitting around, I don’t think it’d be poorly spent.
And maybe, just maybe, you’ll learn from me and try to be just a tiny bit less arbitrary when you’re trying to free up space on your DVR. I think I will.
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