Fatty BoomBatty

The picture at right is just the September issue of Vogue. I was going to take a picture of all the September mags but they wouldn't fit in frame. And I don't even really go in for the Elles and Marie Claires and Vanity Fairs of the world, but even Real Simple and T Style (that's the New York Times adver-tacular, yo) and the two-week, food-focused (and still adver-tacular) New Yorker made for a big fat offering, perfect for stying inside with and flipping through on a steamy Labor Day weekend. Actually, Vogue is the one I haven't gotten to yet--it's too goddamn big to take with me on planes and trains.

I don't know that any of them are particularly revelatory (though I thought The New Yorker's article on counterfeit antique wines was awesome, but then, I would), but I just never get tired of patent leather mary janes and heather grey sweaters. Every year they bust them out like it's the new new thing, and it's so great, because there's nothing new about it; it's all in my closet anyway.

There are always new fun things though. I'm coveting a nice pencil skirt



and also a classy, Hepburn-esque short, swingy jacket

and just for the hell of it, something sparkly. I don't even know where I'd where it--except maybe Vegas, and lord knows I'm always looking for an excuse to go--but it just looks so slick and cool.

Yup, I love me some fall. Now if the temp would just drop below 80. . .

It is awesome being engaged.

If You Can't Stand the Heat. . .

How much longer can the celebrity chef craze last? When is one more celebrity chef one too many?

I'm undecided as to whether the chef-cum-tour guide phenomenon or amateur-cum-chef is worse. Neither one is really food-focused; both are entirely personality-driven, chef-in-your-face orgy of self-indulgence. I will admit to a certain soft spot for Anthony Bourdain, with his dry wit, fondness for smoking and drinking a lot, but still, his advice is hardly practical. But I think the whole genre took a step down with that Andrew Zimmern guy, who's basically just eating raw fish on TV, and it feels like reruns of "You Can't Do That On Television" in more exotic locales.

The flurry of amateur chef shows is perhaps more disturbing, in the same way that all "reality" TV shows are: if there are this many morons running around on TV, how many more must there be in real life? Layer upon layer of obnoxious personalities, uncalled-for weeping, complete unwillingness to take responsibility or make a decision. For sheer guilty pleasure, Hell's Kitchen is the best (worst?), but there's something intriguing about watching other celebrity chefs handicap the next one to join their ranks. I have little use for Top Chef's somewhat random celebrity panel.

Like the "cupcakes with publicists" phenomenon, reality-food-TV seems like another way to unnecessarily complicate what should be simple. Everybody loves food, and you'd love to think you'd cook it for yourself. But instead, you zap a SmartOnes in the microwave so you have time to watch Hell's Kitchen, and dream about cooking--and lots of other people make a whole lot more money in the process.

No Place Like Komi

Yes, that is indeed DC's own Johnny Monis' cute button nose on the cover of Food and Wine's Best New Chefs issue. The accolade is well deserved--Komi's cuisine is some of the most satisfying and inventive I've had in recent months. I can think of no better way to spend an evening and a couple hundred bucks in DC than experiencing the Komi tasting menu that manages to be both comforting and exotic. The chef isn't the only talent in the house, either--the service is impeccable, and sommelier Derek Brown's pairings were spot on and adventurous. I never would have thought to pair the sardines with a superbly dry sherry, but I'm sure glad he did.

F&W features Komi's signature dish of homemade pappardelle with milk-roasted baby goat ragu, but I would highly recommend placing yourselves in the hands of the master.

"News" in the loosest sense of the word

Two articles in The New York Times over the last few days caught my eye. I love the great Gray Lady, but sometimes even she occasionally provides fodder for the argument that newspapers are just outmoded and hopelessly withering in the face of New Media.

Sunday's article about the drop in online sales doesn't seem all that newsworthy as stalwarts of the virtual mall like Gloss or--sniff, sniff--my beloved Girlshop (now replaced by the hopelessly haughty Net-a-Porter) have announced they're biting the dust. Getting their e-mail was news; but Times article about the drop in online buying doesn't mention them, and seems a little out of the loop. I thought the dot-com bubble had already burst, and the industry had rebounded, perhaps not quite as robustly--but then nothing about this economy is as robust as the halcyon days of the Clinton administration, right?

The only interesting thing about Sunday's NYT article was that it fed into my own paranoia. I was a pretty hard-core online fashion addict, but quit more or less cold turkey once I had maxed out a couple of credit cards--and that, my friends, was when the dot-com bubble burst, leaving me to wonder, psychotically, if there never was any bubble, just me, Girlshop, and my AmEx. Some years later, I re-engaged in online shopping, more responsibly, more gradually, but still. So then when the summer went by and I'd bought nothing except some skinny jeans that I sent back, and then I hear they're going out of business, it raised the dot-com paranoia all over again. How many of us are really buying from these sites? The merch was always seemed expensive enough; I just assumed someone, somewhere was making money, and Girlshop was around long enough--and really so was Gloss--that it seemed like it had whethered the storm of online shopping fads (Pets.com, anyone?) and had become an institution replete with offline, real-time anchor to complement its online offerings.

So today, the NYT tops itself with this authoritative discourse on OpenTable.com. I don't know about you buy I've been using OpenTable for about a hundred years and presumably, so have the restaurants at which I have made reservations using its services. The little tidbits about the way restaurants use it to log info about their patrons--ok, that was interesting--but news? No.

No news, I guess, is good news, right?

Engagious

We're engaged now. The event I have regarded as an inevitability for the last three years is finally here and I am completely surprised. So now, like everyone else in my family, I have the opportunity to get all nuts about Wedding Planning, and marvel at how the heart grows. It's news that people take with almost uniform giddyness and cheer. The instinct to send cards and gives is more instantaneous than any announcement I've ever made. The response has been far more powerful than my moving and new job announcements of recent years--and I moved to some pretty freakin' faraway places.

It's wonderful. I don't even have words for it.

"They're cupcakes with publicists. . ."

There is, actually, some part of me that wants to quit and bake cupcakes--and what the hell, muffins, moon pies and oatmeal carmelitas--and sell them to the starved for food and time who will pay $4 each for them. But jesus--people are doing it for free, for other people:

Kirk Rossberg, who owns the 23-year-old Torrance Bakery in the South Bay area of Los
Angeles County, said he’s swamped with intern applicants. 'Until last year, I never had people
asking to work for free,” said Mr. Rossberg, who is also president of the California Retail Bakers
Association. He estimated that of the 30 interns he used this year, 90 percent were leaving
professional careers to pursue a dream of opening a bakery.'

Surely there must be a middleground, right? You don't have to take the Ivy League degree and Fortune 500 job and chuck them whole hog to bake cupcakes and build a bakery, surely? Why not just part-time it? Why not--radical idea--just bake cupcakes recreationally instead of trying to sell them or turn them into the hottest hipper-than-thou manna?

It's pastry, people.

"All I really need to know. . ."

Whatever happened to Robert Fulghum? Beloved folksy minister-author of All I Really Need to Know and Uh Oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door, with their meditations on children, chicken-fried steak and Salvation Army bell-ringing. He seems tailor-made for the blogosphere, with his random anecdotes extrapolated in to life lessons. His signature is even a little cartoony graphic.

But I haven't heard about him in years and years, so imagine my surprise when I googled him (oh sweet Swiss army knife of the Web) and found that he is, in fact blogging.

Not exactly blogging. More of a journal. No comments or interactivity; a little more room between entries. I actually think he probably should democratize the format and embrace more of a conventional blog format because so much of his published writing depends upon the stories others have told him. Evidently, he's big in the Czech Republic right now. Or at least he was in 2006. . .

On some level, though, I respect his adherence to traditional, non-UGC format. I actually am not taking all that well to it myself. I want to research, outline, draft and edit; the blog thing is counterintuitive. Actually, it's intuitive, but why would I want to hang my intuitions out there for the whole world to see? It's a weird medium. In a world where everyone writes, who really wants to read?

"Engaged is the new black"

That gem comes from my brother, a recently-engaged man himself. The rings have really been flying lately--brother, cousins, some more or less random folks I grew up with, none of whom I know all that well but the fact that they're all in the old local paper all at the same time, getting married, makes one pay attention.

The strangers --former classmates and neighbors, acquaintances-- that's just coincidence and curiosity, but for the people I know and love, my brother especially, it's an occasion for astonishing delight. I can't say this out loud without sounding trite, and probably preposterously drunk but: it's a beautiful thing, maybe even miraculous. It seems really extraordinary that people in this day and age can love this way--that your family, and your heart, grows to expand and encompass someone else, amid all the distractions and pressures and events of life in this day and age. With everything else that concerns us, that occupies us, how does one even have the time or ability to fall in love that way? But we do, and I'm elated about it. It's elating enough when it happens to you, but when it happens to a person you've known and loved since birth--before, even--it's really extraordinary.

So hooray for the engaged. Bravo for the beloved. It's an extraordinary and wonderful day when engaged is the new black.

Big Bird

One day a few weeks ago, I came home from a week-long business trip to find that a mourning dove had built a nest just outside the door wall in my living room. On a six-inch metal ledge wedged between the screen and the railing that gives the illusion of outdoor space but in fact exists only to keep one from falling from the window, a fat mama bird accumulated a pile of twigs and grass and laid her eggs there.

What a sad and ironic urban cliche, to be not in one's own home for so long that a little bird--actually, a pair of them, as I eventually discovered--moved in and set up house.

I actually felt a little flutter of excitement when, up early one morning I caught sight of the nest before the dad came in to sit for the day shift, and saw the three tiny speckled spheres he was returning to warm. We're having a baby, I thought to myself. With Mother's Day just around the corner, I tingled with the anticipation of a heartwarming avian display of maternal tenderness and the miracle of life.

For the most part, a lot of it was boring or gross. Some dander floating around every now and then, but aside from that one glimpse of tiny eggs, mostly just a bird, sitting in a nest. I began to worry that I should be feeding mama bird--who I named Lady Jane Grey--but when I did some research I learned that both parents swap nesting time while the other goes out and eats. One day--finally, a day at home--I hung around to witness both shift changes and learned how to recognize both parents.

I tried to figure out when the hatchlings would arrive, reading encyclopedia entries and counting how many days it had been since I discovered the nest. Riding the metro to work in the morning, one arm up above my head to grasp the rail, I reached with the other arm around my body to feel which device, phone or blackberry, was fluttering with a morning message, like an expectant mother touching her tummy, and my mind flickered back to my round mama bird, and I wondered if she could feel anything scratching within her little eggs. I began to fret that something was wrong, that the eggs had slipped from the nest and the parents were living on my ledge in a state of denial, or that the eggs were simply stillborn.

And then that Saturday, peering fretfully at the nest and fearing the worst while drinking my coffee, I saw fluffy tiny feathers peeking our from under Lady Jane. And then the shift change happened, and there they were.

Teeny, tiny, downy little hatchlings. And one lonely egg, about which one had to assume the worst. They were uncovered for just a fleeting moment--you can see Dad's torso just on the other side of this picture. Silent and blinking, they spent most of their time eating from their parent's craw and filling the nest with poop.

Even tiny chicks eating looks violent and uncomfortable--not at all the delicate tender parent-child bonding experience you'd want to imagine. The mama bird looks like she's being savaged by her infants, their beaks protruding into her own, over and over, fighting each other, nipping at her. It's actually quite unsettling.
The next week, after another trip out of town and some long days at the office, I wondered if they'd still be there the next time I was home during daylight hours to see what was going on with my little nest. Sure enough they were, the chicks now big enough that they propped their mother up on their backs and looked like giant, absurd slippers.

They were cute. I found myself talking to Lady Jane Grey at odd moments, making snarky remarks about sunbathers lolling in the courtyard below, asking about her day, muttering about mine. I laid on my tummy by the window and watched the hatchlings wiggle their little wings.

And then one day they were gone. One Sunday, the hatchlings hopped out of their nest and spent most of the day on the opposite end of the window ledge, all on their own.
The next morning, all that was left was an empty nest filled with droppings.

It was not exactly heartwarming avian drama or even National Geographic-worthy nature education, but it was a little bit inspiring, a little bit comforting that my mostly empty apartment gave some shelter to a creature that needed it. I'm relieved that they're gone now--I didn't open my screen at all because I didn't want to disturb them, and then there's the dander issue. I waited for them to be born, watched them grow, saw them fly away. Now I'm just another empty nester.