Munchies

I bake bread several times a week, but it's certainly a time-consuming process, and although you can, with practice, manage long, slow rises by the careful use of refrigeration, there are plenty of times when you decide to cook dinner but haven't got time for the minimum several hours necessary to make a decent loaf of leavened bread. Of course, you could go to the store and buy a probably day-old baguette, or you could follow this simple recipe, which produces a delicious, moist, unleavened flat bread that resembles a cross between fresh pita and naan.

You will need just four ingredients and a good, heavy, skillet, preferably cast iron, but steel or otherwise (but not no-stick) will do. The ingredients are flour, water, softened clarified butter (or ghee) and salt--I should say, five ingredients, because it's best with a mixture of two types of flour.

I use a little over a cup of unbleached All-Purpose flour and little under a cup of white whole wheat flour. This I place into a deep ceramic mixing bowl. I add just a teaspoon of fine sea salt and a tablespoon of soft, clarified butter. Then, mixing steadily in a clockwise direction with one hand, I slowly pour in a cup and a quarter of room-temperature water.

As with any bread recipe, you will want to have excess flour handy, as the recipe makes a wet dough and you will need to work in more flour, a pinch at a time, as you work the dough. Use extra AP flour for this. Unlike a leavened bread, however, you won't need to do any heavy, table-top kneading. Simply continue mixing, working, and rolling the dough, adding more flour as needed, until it feels springy, stretchy, and comes easily unstuck from the sides of the bowl.

Wrap this dough in a moist towel and let stand at room temperature for half an hour.

When you are ready to cook, get your cast iron skillet very, very hot over a high heat. Unwrap the dough and pinch off enough to roll into a ball of a little under 2" in diameter. Rewrap the rest of the dough. On a well-floured board, using a floured, wooden pin, roll the ball flat, less than 1/4" thick. Place onto the hot skillet. It will quickly cook--usually just a minute or so to the side, and will develop some black, circular marks like naan. When it has stiffened and shows the scalds on its pan side, flip it over. When that side shows marks, remove it to a plate and let rest, uncovered.

Repeat this process with the rest of the dough. It will make five or six flat breads.

Transinhumanism

A certain segment of naive technological optimists overly fond of the million-pound doorstops of Vernor Vinge et al. believe that any day now we will all upload ourselves into the moon and live lives of superhuman cosmic contemplation, a virtual electronic paradise in which all of our wants and pleasures are provided for and met instantaneously, with wormholes and nanobot or some shit like that. It turns out that this black-box quantum utopia already exists, and its name is Goldman Sachs. These guys have run one hell of a savage burn, haven't they? Fuck:

Because, The Internet

The Thirty-Thousand Feet Level

Chuck Todd is a straight up moron. I mean, look, if I could have occupied Chuck Todd's grotesque pinnipedal FlavrSavr form at any point during that interview with Glenn Greenwald, I'd've said, "Look, Glenn, you're being painfully naive. The Augustus retains the forms and rituals of the Republic even as he exercises ultimate authority. It isn't just, fair, or Democratic, but it's the way things work. Some squishy homunculus with no pull and no friends like Johnny Yoo may one day get tossed to the bleating mob outside the palace--if, that is, the mob can unhook its high fructose corn syrup drip and haul its fat diabetic ass from the couch to the palace in the first place--but no one important is going down for this, because yes, they are quite literally above the law, as immune to it as sharks to cancer."

But as I do not yet have such powers, I listened with bemused, giggly horror as Glenn made Chuck Todd appear even dumber than Chuck Todd is ordinarily able to make himself appear in bright lights of teevee land. Lest you think I damn with faint praise, let me just say that I honestly believe this to be a remarkable feat on Glenn's part, the equivalent of unscrambling eggs or multiplying zero by some other figure and ending up with a negative number. Chuck's "view from thirty-thousand feet" seemed to be no more or less than the matte wing of the aircraft carrying him along at that breathless height, and while Greenwald strove to discuss the topology below, Chuck could not tear himself from all the fascinating patterns of rivets. By the end of the interview, I felt actual sympathy, true and honest pity, for as Glenn needled him for trying to wheedle out of first-person statements by claiming to have acted as a mere interlocutor, it became perfectly apparent that poor Chuck Todd has no opinions of his own, no cognitive process to speak of, no moral sentience if I may turn a phrase; he is more than a mirror, less than an empty vessel.

Finally, on a related but different note, American "issues" have a curious geometry. All off them, apparently, have two sides. There are no triangles in politics, only two perfectly parallel lines, like train tracks, which, though they never meet, always seem to end up at the same destination.

Writ

This same line of questioning In re both gun rights and abortion arose yesterday from some other Republotron, with similar evasions from Sotomayor, and yet I sense a particular irony here, that these Senators, who rightly think her answers on these points are mechanistic, are the same ones who spent the most time abhorring "emphathy" and declaring that the immutable, unchangeable, Rock of Ages that is Our Constitution is the sole source of inerrant earthly judicial authority; that close reading is the only acceptable form of textual analysis.

Everything I Know about the US Government, I Learned from Reading Long-Winded Science Fiction with Weird Sex Scenes

There is a folk belief that goldfish have no memory, that every day, indeed, every moment is completely new for them. Now this is plainly untrue. Although their memory such as it is plainly functions differently from human memory--they do not, presumably, remember the time when their cokehead brother tried to break into their parent's house, nor do they dream of their first sexual encounters, or what have you--it plainly function. They are aware of feeding times. They are able to navigate their environment. With experience, they can differentiate between a hand and a net. Introducing them into a new environment confuses them, which is plain evidence of familiarity, i.e. memory, as is the subsequent exploration of that environment.

The same cannot be said of Democrats, who live in a timeless now, endlessly rediscovering, for instance, that the United States Senate is an antidemocratic oligopoly. Ha ha. No shit! Why, almost as if it were created "to restrain, if possible, the fury of democracy." To be a more "deliberative" body. To bottle up the popular passions, shake 'em up, and spray them harmlessly away in a effulgence of didactical pedantry, a hem of hawing, a foam of spilling champagne.

[W]hen progressive members of the House of Representatives manage to acquire Senate seats, the tendency is for them to immediately fall in love with their dysfunctional branch’s perks rather than to arrive on the scene with a determination to reform the system in the interests of justice.

All reformers are closet aristocrats. You know who said that? The Gawd Emprir of Doon, dats who!

The Rainbow Connection

Crispin's take on that age-old theme, that everything that rises must converge, is shrewd and true, particularly when you consider the durability and resiliency of the hegemon. Well, fuck, Rome's fourth emperor was born in France or some shit; by the time the Five Good Emperors rolled around, any old Spanish equestrian could put on the ring; by the third century, any Syrian with a nasty streak was eligible.

I mean, look at Barack Obama, who has proven that a black dude from distant Islamia can shovel public monies into the gaping mouths of Wall Street hippos and escalate wars in Asia as well as any white dude from Kennebunkport. Now Sonia from the Barrio can prove that any Latina girl will one day have the opportunity to expand police powers, ignore the ninth and tenth amendments, rule in favor of the prosecution, and further codify the right of the state to seize private property because CONDOS!

A Few Sick, Perverted Individuals

A couple of things strike me about this prototypical Ignatius column in which he performs his essential function of pretending to take seriously the Obama administration's non-intention of punishing past torture and skulduggery in the intelligence [sic] services and mournfully lamenting the terrible damage that it just might conceivably do to the nation if it were to be undertaken, which it won't be, except perhaps one day as a stratospheric, blue-ribbon, elder-statesman commission report sorta dealio. What was I saying? Yes: what strikes me: two turns of phrase. The first is the popular Washingtonism, "gotcha culture," or "'gotcha' culture," as it is popularly rendered, for reasons quite unfathomable to me. Should I ever be hauled before the judge for some or other crime against main or nature, I plain to avail myself fully of this argument. Yer ahnner, if it pleaze da coort, younz ain't got no bizniss haulin me bifoor younz. Dis gotcha culcher's gawdah stawp! We're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America!

Otherwise, Ignatius reveals himself, like so many Washingtonians, to be gayer than gay, as he completely bungles a football metaphor in his tinkerbell conclusion:

If Obama means what he has said about looking forward rather than backward, then he should stick to his guns -- and hope that the attorney general and House speaker agree that it's time to stop kicking this football.

He'll stick to his guns and stop kicking the ball. Whatever. You know, you don't kick a football to punish it, to make it uncomfortable. The football is insensate. It doesn't mind being banged around! Field goals and extra points aside, the main reason you kick the ball in football is that, either by scoring or by running out of downs, it's time to give the other side a chance to run around with it. A truth whose metaphoric value to the Washington Professional Elections League is suddenly quite apt, for while the hometown crowd may wish for the win, the League is content to sell ads and broadcast rights.

But David's confusion is what you get when all you've got to go on are the Redskins.

Goldman Suchs

Whatever. Fuck Goldman. In the words of dinosaurkeeper Robert Muldoon, "They should all be destroyed." Worthless fucks. What productive industry are they capitalizing? The financial services sector isn't the economy, it's the economy's metastasized malignant body-devouring tumor. The economy requires immediate euthanasia. It is the only moral option.

Her Majesty's Secret Service

All sorts of people are like what did Cheney know and when did he know it, but I will tell you straight up that the only thing you need to know about this supersecret CIA bullshit is that it is as if Pinky and Chicolini from Duck Soup were kidnapped by Graham Greene and raped by all of his stories at once. Forever! The United States is very, very good at killing wedding parties with flying murderbots, but when it comes to doing the Jason Bourne shit, we are so George Lazenby. Cheney's crack assassination squad was like A Fish Called Wanda! Ha ha. K-k-k-k-k-Ken! Faggots!

Herstory Repeating

The first day of questioning mostly demonstrated that a negative-year law student like myself, by which I mean, a person who, as a junior undergraduate English major at a hippie liberal arts college briefly panicked about his future and headed for the bookstore fully intending to buy an LSAT prep book but ran into his buddy and somehow ended up taking bong rips in the Arb and talking about what would happen if Homi Bhabha had scripted the prospective student tours . . . uh, anyway . . . what I am saying is, even I as someone who did not go to law school, let alone ever practiced law, found myself fairly appalled by the endless insistence of senators that the proper task of a judge is to check her emotions at the door so as to be better able to pull magnificently irrelevant cultural pronouncements from some dark recess beyond the far border of her small intestine, shine them, place them on a glossy pedestal, and propound them as decisions in cases seemingly involving narrow procedural questions. Rome's Senators of the imperial age were famously "men not fit to be slaves"; ours aren't fit to be buffoons. It's like they say about history. First as tragedy, then as farts.

Newspaper coverage has been relentlessly banal, and I won't bother linking the headlines, which proclaim tough question even as none is in evidence in the articles that follow. Journalists keep offering the detail of her calm and unflappable demeanor as if it were interesting, indeed, impressive. It seems to me to be expected. Since sports and gaming metaphors are the order of the week, and since I do enjoy my barroom pool, I note that you can always tell who's winning at eight-ball by demeanor and volume: the loud talker, the guy who takes his shots with a flourish--he's going to lose. Her calmness is evidence only of a foregone conclusion. Meanwhile, the truthteller of the whole circus has been Chuckles Schumer, who reassured us all when he guaranteed that our new justice will reliably side with power, kill orphans, skin puppies, worship at the altar of Molech, etc., etc., gracias, amen.

Racialism

I just want to state unequivocally that I believe that only homosexual males with mixed Italian, German, Russian, and Ukranian ethno-national backgrounds and a split Roman Catholic, Ashkenazi Jewish family religious history are capable of reaching just judicial judgments.

The Medium Is the Massage

Here, I think, is definitive proof that newspapers were not doomed to obsolescence by the internet so much as by the Pony Express . . . that their inexorable decline has simple been gathering speed down the slope for all the time since:

Elysian Fields

Will Wilkinson has a note about so-called urban farming that's right on the money--until we start eating foodstuffs synthesized by nanites out of the basement algae pond, it will require land to sustain large-scale agriculture. I say this as an avid urban agrophile with a thriving garden that's awfully large . . . for a neighborhood in which my 18' x 50' side yard is the largest green space that's not a city park. You can grow an awful lot of tomatoes and zucchinis, and my sorrel is out of control, but were it not for that expensive bastard John Mackey and his goddamned yuppie food emporium, I would starve. I do, however, think that encouraging what you might call near urban agriculture, which is to say bulldozing the exurbs back into arable land, would do us all a world of good. Western Pennsylvania, for instance, is already some of the finest farm country on earth, particularly rich for dairy and vegetable farming, as well as the best lamb on earth.

Take Two

Probably at my own peril, I'm going to quibble with Twisty's assessment of Doc Strangelove. The boot-throwing moment she describes, when the mad doctor elucidates his plan for a "nucleus" of humanity surviving in "some of our deeper mineshafts" and "breed[ing] prodigiously" ("lots of time and little to do"), is one of the gravest indictments of menfolk ever to get a belly laugh, as the impending global nuclear apocalypse is momentarily forgotten while the randy Air Force General Buck Turgidson (was there ever a script with better names than this?) takes a moment to dilate grinningly on "the abandonment of the so called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned" and the dour Russian ambassador offers his ungrudging confession: "you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor." The insistent phallocentrism of the movie--there is hardly a frame that passes without a penis--is the point. These men are obsessed with their cocksmanship, and when faced with personal failure along those lines, they turn to their nukes, the biggest dicks of all. Jack D. Ripper, the insane Air Force General played so marvelously by Sterling Hayden, whose every move and inflection simultaneously conveys broken pride, total singularity of purpose, power, and defeat, goes on about the monstrous Communist plot to fluoridate water, but we shouldn't forget that the plot first occurred to him "during the physical act of love." In other words, he blames it on a woman. Fortunately, he was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence. It is true that the one female character who appears is Buck Turgidson's bombshell secretary-centerfold-lover in high heels and a bikini, but I note that she is the only person in the film who competently performs her job, and I also note that she is quickly forgotten by Turgidson after a brief telephone call to "The War Room." ("I told you never to call me here!") Because, for the record, it is perfectly obvious that most of these guys, if they could only admit it, would much prefer to be fucking each other.

None of this is to say that Kubrick didn't harbor a streak of misogyny. Barry Lyndon, which remains the most visually perfect film ever made, a masterpiece of composition and light that plays like twenty-four old masters per second, is a searing indictment of human ritualism, acquisitiveness, and moral decadence, sparing neither men nor women, but it seemed to me on a recent viewing to take an especially searing view of women. Nor should we ignore the master's most thoroughly woman-hating flick, and his greatest, most irredeemable failure, Eyes Wide Shut, in which world-famous drag king Tom of the House of Cruise badly impersonates a male heterosexual for eighteen straight hours while Sydney Pollack dons a hockey mask, monkey suit, renaissance costume, cross-country skis, space helmet, and Sean Connery's red diaper from Zardoz and skates around a mansion penetrating various vessels all because Nicole Kidman forgot to tell Tom that she missed the nice white hippie who usually sold them weed and decided to buy some itchy loveboat from a dude in the projects instead. Or something. Dominic Harlan's broken-piano soundtrack kept distracting me.

If the movie gods were just, which needless to say they aren't, Kubrick would've been permitted to finish his career by completing AI, and Spielberg would've gotten Eyes Wide Shut, whose many boudoirs he could've stocked with velociraptors peeking around Elgin marbles and hiding behind the velvet drapes. Elaborate games of hide and seek that don't ultimately go anywhere are more his forte than are fairy tales that lay bare the futility of love. John Williams would have scored it with a million piece orchestra, and Kidman could've fulfilled Twisty's truly identified, inevitable, obligatory scene:

the scene where a dude and a woman are running, running, and the virile dude is yanking the woman’s hand, dragging her pathetic terrified person along, and she falls because she’s wearing fucking high heels, and he picks her up and they continue running, running, him dragging her along like a wagonload of screaming mimis.

And . . . print.

In Spite Of

Pittsburgh has been much in the news lately, from the Financial Times to Forbes to James Wolcott's appreciative love note, and let me just say that our success seems like powerful evidence that libertarians and minarchist types are proven totally wrong by our current success, as we have enjoyed, for the past three decades, nothing but the most astonishing competent, proactive, forward-looking, thrifty, and effective government. Under no circumstances should Pittsburgh's redevelopment be interpreted as the concerted effort of private citizens, foundations, and businesses to circumvent hopelessly flawed, facile, and half-witted county and municipal governments whose high officials are uniformly bent on frustrating and thwarting decent local endeavors in favor of pie-in-the-sky schemes. Were it not for the offices of the mayor and county executive, the departments of public works, building inspection, and safety . . . were it not for city and county council, for all the wise leadership, we would not be where we are today.

Supreme Questions, an Audenesque

If you were an animal, Sonia,
what animal would you be?
A bear, a racoon,
a humpback whale,
a flea?
A tidewater heron or a garden snail?
A spoon-
bill, otter, sea worm, or anemone?
A fat and flower-sagging bumble-bee?
A kitten or a spider or a me?

A Snapshot, upon Return

The past week brought the departure of Livia Sarah Palin Augusta from the Juneau Palatine, drawn heavenward, I am told, still alive in mortal flesh, on a flaming dogsled towed by a high-waled sleigh hitched to a Ford F-350 borne aloft by ten thousand giant peacocks and eight tiny reindeer and two hard-boiled eggs. It also brought stories of the departure of American troops from Iraq, which they have accomplished with their usual alacrity by not actually leaving, or, as Matthew Yglesias might put it, "perform[ing] their job with skill, and leaving Iraqi leaders with a handshake." Two events, in other words, that technically happened, and yet did not happen. Marshall McLuhan, eat Jean Baudrillard's heart out.

With all of these flocked non-departures--America from Iraq, Sarah Palin from the national scene--I am struck after my week-long hermitage mostly by the thoroughgoing asininity of events. America seems engaged, at the moment, in a vast and metaphysical contemplation of the unreal, object without aspect, effect without action, sense without input, and so forth and so on. I was afraid, I'll now admit, that the Obama era, even if prone to crisis (and what era isn't?), would bring a certain mellowing of the American Zeitgeist, a quieter and more circumspect American hegemon, a domestic political life composed of a million Clintonian "initiatives" packaged as reform. This has turned out not at all to be the case, as these early months of the new regime have seen a rededication to the rule and destruction of Abroad along with the greatest transfer of wealth ever, from private citizens to failed enterprises. Evidently we are now engaged in some sort of massive something-or-other in the arid south of Afghanistan, "the heart of the Taliban opium trade" as an NPR commenter had it (me, I thought it was only the point of origin, the heart being these United States); Obama is on the radio, reminding us that the bag of beans he gave us is not a bag of magic beans, that it will require two solid years of thickly spread bullshit as fertilizer before it sprouts; and today, Sonia Sotomayor, the heart-devouring, Amazon-priestess, Quetzalcoatlienne dominatrix of pre-hipster ethnic Brooklyn about to ascend the capital, where, like Molly Bloom, the Senate will speak a many-voiced monologue with no full stops until at last it says yes I will Yes

News of the Feared

So today The Internet told me:


No further comment. See younz soon.