Thanksgiving

It's 5:00 AM and I've got nervous energy. I think it's 'cause I volunteered Astrid and I to make the stuffing for the holiday feast, which will commence in about 11 hours. I'm sure it will turn out okay, but as a friend called it yesterday, "You're making THE side dish!" The pressure is on!

Before looking at any recipes, I decided that these ingredients would be essential, and I went and bought them in mass quantities:

whole chestnuts
celery
onions and shallots
mushrooms
fresh parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme (which I failed to write in that order on the grocery list.)
veggie broth

Then, on scoping a few recipes for making stuffing from scratch, we went and got three huge loaves of sourdough which we'll toast in the oven to begin the process. We'll roast the chestnuts, sautée the veggies, combine everything, then bake the stuffing. It seems pretty straightforward and easy.

Another friend yesterday assured me that only three things could possibly go wrong:

1. The stuffing is too bland.
2. The stuffing is too dry.
3. The stuffing is too soggy.

The first two will be remedied automatically by dousing the stuff in gravy, so really aren't problems at all. The third means we're shit outta luck. I think I can handle this.

Another anxiety about the day ahead, though this is not what's keeping me up, is the probability that I will eat way too much food. I've been doing pretty well lately with "portion control," as the diet gurus might say, but Thanksgiving is a notorious rule-breaking event, and the entirety of the meal, aside from the turkey, is carbs, glorious carbs. I'm really glad I never went in for the Atkins diet. Not to malign it, because there are some sound scientific grounds for why it works, but I just don't think substantially reducing carbs and sugar over my lifetime is a sustainable strategy for me. I'm not much for sugar, anyway (it's really the easiest thing for me to control) but definitely decreasing highly refined carbs and increasing complex carbs like whole grains and veggies is something I've been focused on and continue to tackle. Anyway, today won't be a whole grain kinda day, but still, eating til I'm done and not keeling over from a gorged gut will be my modest health-conscious goal. That, and Astrid and I are planning to start the day, even before preparing the stuffing, by going to the gym and doing some cardio. She checked, and 24-hour is indeed open for business today. It'll be really interesting to see how many other people will be at the gym on a major eating-oriented holiday.

Gonna try to go back to bed now.

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.

Vintage Bree: Nagel and Me

My fascination with the gaudy and über-'80s lithographs of Patrick Nagel started in about 1990 when I was known to frequent, frequently, a now-bygone coffee house in San Jose called The Phoenix. I've wanted to write about the Phoenix for years, and I may yet get around to an installment of Vintage Bree about the history of cafés-past in my life, but the thing that is germane to this story is that the upstairs of the Phoenix was lined with dozens of framed Nagel prints. The aesthetic of the café was generally more palatable than that, with minimal décor and ample seating, but for some reason, the upstairs was crowded with Nagels. This prompted B. and I to write a song about them called "Women on the Walls," in which we extolled the eerie omnipresence of Nagel's women in the café and imagined the highly dramatic stories of their lives. The song, earnest only in its minor chords, a total product of our collective early-twenties angst, became a camp classic among our friends for many years. It even utilized Berkeleyan principles (ripped naïvely from the Western philosophy class I was taking at the junior college at the time) in a refrain presenting the Women and then flippantly erasing them from consciousness with the bat of a heavily mascara'd eye. While the song remained a party trick for a number of years, it faded into obscurity just like other songs I'd written with friends from that era, many penned at the Phoenix, until B. and I had a rare opportunity to showcase it in public.

It was November of 1997, and Mag & Ana had organized Nagel Night at Trannyshack, the local irreverent underground drag club. The ode included many fabulous performers lip-synching to Eighties songs, arty send-ups of Nagel's portraits, and even a (very tasteful!) dramatic reenactment (lovingly rendered by our friend Dingo Chan) of Patrick Nagel's tragically ironic death scene (he had died in 1984 of a heart attack after doing 15 minutes of cardiovascular exercise in a charity event for the American Heart Association). Take a moment to absorb that last sentence, please.

B. and I, not in drag, nor Eighties pancake makeup, nor lip-synching, were a bit oddball in this clamour of oddness. It was the two of us on stage, with my acoustic guitar, singing this sort of hippy dirge in our very untrained voices. And now, at long last, for the first time ever at Toothpick Labeling, I present to you the original song, newly recorded in crystal clear digital!



It was quite a happening. But, dear readers, there is so much more to the story, if it can be believed! The very next day, a foggy November day it was, found me canvassing (I worked for the Peace Organization back then) in a modest neighborhood in Pacific Grove, a quaint seaside town just south of Monterey. It was my charge to find new supporters and renew the members of the Org that lived in the neighborhood. I was excited to speak with a gentleman that evening who had given $100 to the canvasser last year, and knocked fervidly at the door of his tiny bungalow apartment. The man of the house answered the door, a pale, gaunt, bespectacled guy, pleasant to talk to. As we discussed the current campaigns of the Organization from his doorway, I caught glimpses of the tiny apartment in the background. Every surface in the place was piled with papers and used dishes and scattered pieces of electronic equipment and half empty bottles of Zima and I'm sure lots of other stuff I can't remember or even fabricate for you now. The one thing that I remember with absolute clarity was perched on the coffee table among all this clutter: a white ceramic Nagel coffee mug.

I said, "Is that a Nagel coffee mug?" He replied with interest that it was, and asked me about my knowledge of Nagel. Right away I could tell that I had to keep my snooty "so bad it's good" attitude about Nagel in check. He regaled me with stories of his avid collecting and his admiration for the artwork of this master lithographer. I relayed to him the story of "Women On The Walls," and my experience of performing it in San Francisco the night before, and he was enthralled. Then, he showed me his Pride and Joy. Rolling up his shirt sleeve, he revealed one of Nagel's Women tattooed on his left bicep.

Full of awe at the synchronicity of the cosmos, I renewed his membership at $250.00 and walked off into the Monterey mist.

Today is Patrick Nagel's birthday. He would have been 63.

___________________________
Women On The Walls ©1990/2008 astrobarry & bree (with many thanks to Cisco for his engineering prowess and to B. for being there. For all of it.)

I love my straight friends.

I have to plug my pal James' recent column at SFgate, Rocchi's Retro Rental. Not only is the review about one of my very favorite films, Todd Haynes' gorgeous and gripping Far From Heaven, it's also a poignant, deeply heartfelt response to the appalling passage of Prop 8. I guess I've outed James as straight here, but he's also bravely outed himself in his column as an atheist and a lover of justice.

Thank you James.
xo
Bree

What's in a name?

I've been asked a bunch of times why this blog is called "Toothpick Labeling." I should really give credit where it's due finally and explain that it comes from a scene in the influential Richard Linklater film Slacker, in which a man ("Happy-Go-Lucky Guy") wanders into a diner and encounters an emotionally disturbed woman ("Traumatized Yacht Owner") muttering to herself:

TRAUMATIZED YACHT OWNER
...you should, you should, you, you should never traumatize a woman sexually--I should know, I'm a medical doctor. You should never, traumatize, you should never name things in order...

CRANKY COOK
Hey, cool it down over here.

The Happy-Go-Lucky Guy is perplexed by this all but just sits there. He quietly leans over to observe the lady until she once again focuses her attention on him.

TRAUMATIZED YACHT OWNER
...Toothpicks, toothpicks, toothpick labeling...

It's a bit of dialogue that has long captured my imagination, though admittedly, I'd always sort of glossed over the psychological import of this woman's damaged disposition. I'd rather been drawn by the obsessive quality of the concept of the labeling of toothpicks. How does one label a toothpick, anyway? It seems a brain-breaking exercise destined for failure. The idea of it reflects the myopic detail-orientation of a personal blog, at least one that I would author, and when it came time for me to begin my writings at Blogger after making my online journaling home at Diaryland for three years, it rose somehow from the deep reaches of my neocortex as a suitable name for the new venture. I think it's turned out to be rather apt.

Since the Election

...I've mourned the passage of Prop 8.
...I've started to feel hopeful that we'll overturn the motherfucker.
...I've kissed two women other than my girlfriend. *Swoon!*
...I've broken a pint glass with my bare hand and lived to tell about it.
...I've connected with old friends on facebook and in person.
...I've enjoyed an evening at home with Astrid and roasted pumpkin soup.
...I've been writing down my dreams.
...I've been working on a blog entry about Patrick Nagel.
...I've been enjoying the minutiae.

Sorrow Trumps Elation

It's weirdly alienating to be a queer progressive in California today. I want to be happy about Obama's victory, about the American electorate sending a clear mandate to separate ourselves from the last eight years of endless and causeless warfare and the stripping away of civil rights and human needs programs that has gone along with it. And while I voted not for Obama, but for Green candidate Cynthia McKinney from my safe 24% margin state of California, I was still thrilled that Obama trounced McCain, and that the Democrats, for whom I harbor quite a lot of criticism, swept into an easy majority in the House and Senate.

But my momentary (if ambivalent) euphoria quickly dissolved into grief as I watched the returns come in from my Golden State and began to grapple with the passage of Proposition 8.

Over 5 million of my fellow Californians just told me that my relationship isn't as valid as theirs. That I am a second-class citizen. Even for a person like me, an out queer woman who is loved and supported by her family, who is proud to be part of the vital, brilliant LGBT subculture, who feels secure with herself and her sexuality, even for me, I feel shame. What is perhaps most profound for me as I try to understand my own reaction to this vote is that, even as someone who is critical of marriage as an institution, who has no interest in getting married, the passage of Prop 8 feels incredibly personal: I am wrong, my love is wrong, I am less than. And if this is impacting me so strongly, how is this decision affecting LBGT folks out there who already live with the daily fears and shame of being in the closet, of feeling unsafe in their communities, who have been turned out by their families? To illustrate this indignity further, while Californians voted to take my civil rights away on Tuesday, they handily expanded the rights of chickens. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for the chickens, I really am.

But I'm feeling on the outside of things: outside as a queer mourning the loss of my civil rights. Robbed of my excitement about the changing of the guard in the White House and in Congress. I'm sorry I can't join everyone out there in your joy and celebration about Obama. The bitter is winning out over the sweet.

For the Occasion of Astrid's Birthday...

I am planning the following luxurious meal for this evening:

Salad with arugula and hand-chosen lettuce mix with lemon vinaigrette dressing * Swiss chard and herb tart with two cheeses, fresh thyme and oregano * Greek gigantes white beans in a tomato/garlic/olive oil sauce * Tzatziki made with Greek yogurt, cucumber, garlic, and fresh mint *

My stomach just flipped from thinking about it. Maybe this meal will be a little too rich? And then the drinking will commence. It might be a Tums night. Maybe I'll save the tzatziki for another time.