Bread and Bread

I’ve never been big on predicting the Oscars, an exercise which seems more like political analysis than art criticism. And while I read lots of contemporary literature, I rarely read books in the year they’re published—that means paying for hardbacks, since the library queue for new books is always long. So my “best of” lists are the lists of a semi-hermit, culturally speaking. At least, they’re more a reflection of where I am (thinking about babies and circuses, loving realism despite my hunger for whimsical slippage) than where the culture is. But hey, whose aren’t? So without further ado, here’s where I was in 2009. Where were you? My ten favorite books of 2009: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez A Million Nightingales by Susan Straight Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham The Final Confession of Mabel Stark by Robert Hough Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun by Wafaa Bilal The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi...

So, my 2010 New Year’s resolution is to be less anxious. I know you’re supposed to make concrete resolutions (AK resolved to track all the books she reads on Goodreads ), but this feels like a resolution whose time has come. To get a tiny bit more specific: I resolve not to conflate worry ( oh-my-god-I-might-have-cancer ) with preparation (hey-why-don’t-I-make-a-doctor’s-appointment). It’s still 2009, but I got to practice not freaking out when AK’s car overheated on the way home from San Luis Obispo , where we spent an otherwise fun post-Christmas weekend. Of course we were on one of the few really desolate stretches of the 101. When it became clear we weren’t going to make it to a gas station, we turned onto a dirt road that led to something called the El Camino Winery. I put on my best not-freaking-out voice, which never fools AK. We contemplated our options, and AK called AAA. My friend Jody once found himself in Guatemala without a place to stay. He curled up by the side of the ro...

Since my sister bought a house, I think she has been slowly turning into Martha Stewart. It started years ago with themed gift wrapping, but now she’s hosting family dinners at her place, whereas I’m still mostly of the mindset that the grownups should take care of that shit. It’s my job to show up and eat. So last night I showed up and ate at my sister’s house, along with my dad, his girlfriend Susan, my pseudo-grandma and pseudo-uncle (we’re very Rent when it comes to valuing chosen family as greater than or equal to biological, but with less performance art and more complaining about The Kids Today). My uncle ’s favorite topics are television and food, so I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when a conversation that was ever so briefly about feminism and the forms that countercultural movements have taken throughout history quickly turned into a conversation about how 1) Mae West was so ahead of her time and 2) my uncle ate some amaaaazing brie with toasted pine nuts and butte...

Yesterday morning, around 10 a.m. at Café de Leche , I typed the last word of the first draft of the aforementioned circus novel (it was “air”). Do you like how dramatic I tried to make that sound, what with the time stamp and all? AK was reminding me that it’s important to celebrate, so even though my first thought was more like Fuck, I better get to work than Yay, me! , I’m trying to be more yay-me after the fact. Because even four hundred pages of nonsense is still four hundred pages, right? So what if the circusy part of the novel fizzles out midway and it becomes more of a cruise ship/runaway/mermaid novel? So what if I forgot that one of my main characters is a musician, and he never plays music after chapter four? So what if the draft is full of forced life lessons and out-of-the-blue epiphanies that don’t even mean that much to me , because my 12th grade English teacher was a stickler for books having themes? The last novel (the one that I’m juuust starting to send to agents a...

AK and I decided to host a holiday party this past weekend because 1) all our friends go out of town for the holidays, and we get kind of stir-crazy, so we decided to front-load the season with extra socializing; 2) we wanted an excuse to decorate and bake, even though we're more Sandra Lee than Martha Stewart; and 3) we bought a new chair and we thought it needed a big debut. Or maybe we bought the chair because we were having a party. Hard to say, but here's how it all went down. AK decked our halls with boughs of a tiny Italian Stone Pine. I baked my much-blogged-about sweet potato pie (with store-bought crust). AK baked cookies while we watched an amazing movie called The Exiles , a fictional but documentary- esque movie about Native Americans living on Bunker Hill in the late 1950s. Really, it deserves a post of its own, but this is a party post, so I'll just direct you here . After (or, actually, before) AK and I had a brief debate about whether the cats would get to...

1. i’ll be where it’s lonely Other than the occasional texting dialogue , I don’t blog much about my 16-year-old mentee, whom I’ll call Liana. Partly because, even though our official mentor/mentee relationship ended when she left her group home and reunited with her mom, it seems like bad protocol. Partly because her life is hers. Partly because the world is full of do-gooder writers working with “troubled teens” and then writing about them. But our unofficial mentor/mentee relationship is now becoming even more unofficial, because in a couple of weeks, she’ll be moving to the mountains in the northern reaches of L.A. County. “If you Google ‘Indian Museum,’ you can see the town we’re near and how lonely it looks,” she said. “And then if you follow the map like twenty or thirty more minutes up into the mountains, it gets really lonely. That’s where I’ll be.” Suddenly it felt wrong to let a year and a half of weekly-ish drinks as Coffee Bean and McDonalds—and the occasional movie , libr...

I felt terribly grown up this afternoon because I got something notarized. After Googling “notary find,” I notary found. I went to a tall office building with a panoramic view of the city and waited while a woman wearing business-y pants stamped my photocopied ID. Look at me, I thought, doing things that, just one Google search ago, I didn’t know how to do! Seriously, I can put off shit like this—meaning stuff I’m ever so vaguely confused about—for ages as a result of said confusion. In general, I have not been feeling terribly grown up this week. First, I saw The Hurt Locker , which reminded me why I’m not capable of being in the military. I mean, besides being gay and flat-footed and, increasingly, old (which is not to be confused with grown up). Remember how when Saving Private Ryan came out, everyone was all, This movie really depicts war in all its unglamorous realness. At the time I just thought, This movie has a really lame framing device. But despite knowing nothing about th...

Last night AK, Pedro, Stephen, Maria, Calvin and I gathered for Movie Night, an intentionally less formal undertaking than Book Club, which is probably why we've only managed to do it twice this year. The first time we watched The Curse of the Were-Rabbit , and some of us fell asleep despite the undeniable greatness of Wallace and Gromit . So we decided to start the Favorites Series, beginning with Maria's all-time favorite, Dirty Dancing . I hadn't seen it since I was 11 or 12, and it was a blur of images in my mind, one of which was Bonnie pausing the VCR when Patrick Swayze wrinkles his nose in the final dance number. "My friends always hit pause then too!" AK said. "I never got it." "I know," I said. "Jennifer Grey is much cuter." It was really the perfect Movie Night movie, in that it was equal parts campy and good. Some film school class should study how two dance movies (say, Dirty Dancing and Center Stage ) can have all the s...

Some questions: So, when you say you’re a “rough rider,” you mean you’re into wearing your socks gangsta-style and sampling police sirens, but not hugging girls in a way that might cause you to brush up against fully-clothed boobies? Just checking. ~2:10: Ooh, burn , Angelina Jolie! You know it’s not cool to buy babies from developing countries. Here’s a better idea: Just send some good old-fashioned missionaries! ~2:15: Wait, what about the democratic shift in congress? And how does it relate to hugging? Are you shouting “Repub” in the background? I’m confused, because you just said that Obama was a fist-bumping, non-hugging role model. Although…Republicans are more likely to promote abstinence-only education. Those slutty Dems are always encouraging kids to put on body condoms (known as “clothing”) and front hug anyone who buys them a drink. ~2:56: Oh, man, I wish gay marriage was legal so I could front hug all day long. Is that how babies are made? ~3:25: Check out those red-hoodied...

My last few posts have been awfully wordy, so I'm telling the story of Thanksgiving weekend in pictures (mostly). After stuffing ourselves with turkey, potatoes, salsa and three kinds of pie at the Ybarras , we busted out the arts and crafts. AK and I recently learned how to make our own rubber stamps, which are like the impatient man's linoleum block. AK's sister Lori was a natural (hence the grin), and her mom was a natural at convincing AK to do most of the rubber-carving for her. This is a stamp of a long-legged bird walking in a winter wonderland, of course. AK had a Christmas-in-the-desert theme, complete with coyote and rare desert pine. Tree by Lori, landscape-architect-in-training. If you get one of these in the mail, forget you saw this. If you don't...well, you'll know I ran out not too far into the alphabet. Friday night my high school friends and I had our annual- ish reunion . Angie, Jenessa , Amy, Bonnie, Heather and I met at a Cleveland Browns bar...

1. blessed are the pie eaters, for they have endured my experimental baking The sweet potato pie is in the oven, and if the licking of the mixing bowl is any indication, it's awesome. But I know a lot can happen between mixing bowl and oven. That's the sneaky thing about baking. AK has just settled down for a long winter's nap, having been temporarily felled by the cold that I probably gave her, which someone on a plane to Sacramento probably gave me. It's a season of giving. At dinner, when AK was only mildly glassy-eyed, I mused on the bible passage my group was given in Sunday's how-to-hang-with-evangelicals class . The assignment was SAT/reading comprehension- ish : to decide what the mission of a church that used such a passage as its core philosophy might be. But I got hung up on the passage itself: Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.... Blessed are the peace...

I was halfway through a second helping of pumpkin ice cream at my sister’s pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving party this weekend when it occurred to me: The holidays have begun. Eating season has begun. (For me, eating, like sunshine in Southern California, is perennial, but sometimes the sun is extra bright, you know?) This week I will attempt to bake sweet potato pie, which might sound like a respectably heady undertaking if I were going to make the crust. But Vons already took care of that for me, so I just have the filling to worry about. And I’m still worried. But not worried enough to actually make a practice pie before inflicting it on AK’s family. This way I’ll know for sure that they like me for me , not just for my baking skills. Also, there’s a reason that grocery stores are open and stocked with pre-made pies on Thursday morning, right? While we’re on the subject of American holiday pastimes: It’s not just eating season but shopping season. Apparently I am into practice shopping...

I’ll let you in on a secret (which is maybe not so secret). No matter how much you like poetry (some people do, you know), if you go to a reading with four featured readers, chances are there will be a weak link. During one of the readings, you will be thinking about what you will eat when you get home or what you will wear tomorrow or how to make your own work the non-weak link, if such things are in your control. Not so with last night’s Light the Sky reading at Eagle Rock Plaza. I went to see Jamie, but William Archila , Lory Bedikian and Rachelle Cruz were icing on the cake, or foam on the cappuccino, since the new series takes place in a coffee shop. Which is in a mall. Which blasts muzak from all orifices. Isn’t the whole point of muzak to be unobtrusive? But while the poets had their work cut out for them, I didn’t have to fight to concentrate at any point. Jamie read a bunch of new stuff—including a poem called “My Lover’s Ex-Lovers” that she sweetly blushed her way through—c...

Sometimes I think I'm the only indie movie fan in the world who did not love Rushmore . And I was annoyed with at least 46 percent of The Darjeeling Limited , a movie whose bright colors I remember better than its name, which I always have to look up on IMDb . But apparently The Royal Tenenbaums wasn't a fluke and Wes Anderson and I do get along well after all, because Fantastic Mr. Fox may very well end up being my favorite movie this year (to speak in movie critic terms for a minute there). Like Coraline , another stop-motion animated movie I loved, Mr. Fox creates a complete world of whimsical details, from genetically engineered apples speckled with gold stars to the tighty -whitey underpants worn by Mr. Fox's 12-fox-years-old son. It appears to take place in the late seventies, a palette of earth tones , corduroy and chunky technology. The latter fits perfectly with the movie's celebration of the idiosyncratic . This is a world where foxes wear corduroy jackets...

Thoughts upon seeing this old school Sesame Street video (thanks, Max, for posting it on Facebook!): God, those faces are so familiar. I had Fisher Price Little People action figures of them. If you can call a small plastic person with no arms and no legs an “action figure.” Damn, they’re young. I thought they were my parents’ age. Oh, wait, I guess my parents were young then too. Sesame Street practically invented diversity on TV. Thanks to Sesame Street , I understood multicultural harmony on some gut level long before I actually experienced it (which, since I grew up in Manhattan Beach, was when I went away to college). I guess Mr. Hooper was Jewish? Do you think Bob was gay? I was talking to a girl at a party a few nights ago who said that her parents never let her watch any TV besides Sesame Street when she was a kid. When she was old enough to stay home alone, she would binge on TV and then ice down the set, which her parents would touch when they got home to see if it was ho...

1. out of the box, into the soup pot Saturday we saw The Box , a strange, fascinating and confusing movie that I wish Hollywood would make more of. Since trying to decipher the mythology, ideology and/or plot of the movie kind of makes my head hurt (do aliens equal God? Is free will a lie? A curse? Would it help if I brushed up on my Sartre?), I will leave it at that. Sunday I reprised two thirds of the meal we learned to make in our Hipcooks class . Since I couldn’t be bothered to hunt down saffron for the Portuguese seafood stew, it’s probably best that I didn’t even attempt the soufflé. Soufflées are not for the lazy. But even sans saffron—and sans turmeric, which is what came up when I Googled “saffron substitutes,” but all that was in the T section of my spice shelf was thyme—the stew came out pretty good. It marked my first experience buying live seafood: clams and black mussels. Carrying them home from Fish King , feeling cool for having gone to a real fish market, I explained t...

…besides those circus books (not that I’m done with the circus—I saw Cirque du Soleil ’s Kooza last night and am wondering if it’s possible to become a contortionist when you’re 32 with a bad back. If not, I’d settle for becoming a stilt tumbler , because apparently such things exist. That’s right: tumbling on stilts . Like the Olympics but more bad-ass and with cooler costumes). Oh, right. Back to books: Normal People Don’t Live Like This by Dylan Landis: I tore through this book in the same manner I devoured Prep --something about my apparent hunger to see an angsty female adolescence given literary weight. Landis shines her considerable literary light on moments and images: for example, the care her bisexual protagonist devotes to touching a pregnant friend's wrist rather than her stomach. It's a book of rooms (the mother character is a designer, so this is both literal and figurative); there's sturdy architecture here, but it's often masked by a beautiful set o...

The pics I promised: Real commitment to Halloween means a) wearing creepy zombie eyeball contacts over your regular contacts, b) biting little old ladies in the neck or c) letting a bunch of people spew candy wrappers and bits of peanut brittle all over your house. If you are JP, the answer is d) all of the above. The Beales of Highland Park. Unfortunately this picture doesn't show off my too-short skirt over shorts and stockings. Classy stuff. Roller derby pros Christine (a.k.a. Ida Mann) and Jody (Mr. Ref). Meehan and Christy as Samantha Ronson and Lindsay Lohan . Earlier in the evening, a West Hollywood club owner almost let Meehan cut to the front of the line. Christy tried to hide because she thought her wig would give them away. But what's more LiLo than hiding from the paparazzi? Case in point. On the dance floor/roller rink. Jennifer as cloud princess. The hills of Echo Park do afford a nice view, even if they suck to park on. And no, we were not the only Beales ...

1. haunting the hill house It was a weekend that involved goat cheese-stuffed figs, plentiful Halloween candy and an Oprah sighting, so I don’t really need to tell you it was good, do I? Friday night, AK and I took our long-delayed cooking class at Hipcooks East , where a whole world opened up to me in a small Brewery loft—a world of sea salt, live clams, candying one’s own cashews and not cutting one’s finger off with a dull knife. All new notions. Then I opened my mouth and ate the global proportions of figs, Portuguese seafood stew and chocolate soufflé that we made with the help of a friendly, ebullient chef named Kiersten. On Halloween night we passed out peanut butter cups to exactly three trick-or-treaters, meaning we officially ate more candy than we gave away. Then it was on to JP’s legendary annual Gothtober party in Echo Park. Dressed as Little Edie , I practiced for my future as an eccentric old lady by making AK park illegally rather than find a spot on the crazy-steep...