Mother’s Chili

This is adapted from the Keys to the Kitchen cookbook from 1982. It was originally called “Chili Con Carne” but I am writing it with the alterations we know and love. Mother’s disconcerting notes are “delicious – I cook + eat this whenever I want. 1 hr. – 4 hours – doesn’t matter to us. More hours makes it a little thicker + mingles the flavors.”

2 huge onions, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced fine
2 T chili powder
1 T sugar
1 T vinegar (preferably red wine vinegar)
1 can tomato sauce (or paste)
2 cans tomatoes
2 cans dark red kidney beans (or any ol’ beans, as she’s told me)
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp celery seeds
1/4 tsp oregano
1/4 tsp cayenne
optional: 1/4 cup raw rice, cooked. then added to chili.

1. Saute for 3-5 mins onions, pepper, celery, and garlic in oil.
2. Add everything else.
3. That’s it.

Truffaut: The 400 Blows (1959)

“You take him from here. I’m going home.”

It’s those three little words. “I’m going home.” They really strike me as getting to the heart of things in this film. Not in some silly metaphorical sense, I mean, but literally: this guy has finished up at work, though he’s not finished with this particular job, he’s just handing off the boy to another officer, and he’s going home, where he lives, where he’s likely in charge. Maria Montessori said that children are the most oppressed group of people in the world, and that’s partially what this film is about. The boy barely speaks, and when he does it’s of the lowliest parts of the adult canon, yet somehow we know that he’s good, and know what he’s trying to do, to just get by, to follow his little heart! He doesn’t know where he’s going, that’s obvious, but the same could be said of most of us anyway.

One of the puzzling things to me about this film is how Paris is a character. Is it that Paris is just so beautiful that we can’t take our eyes off her? No…Paris could be ignored, she’s just another city. Yet these lovely cuts of Paris adorn the film every few minutes. And I’ve thought about this for years until it occurred to me today, when the boys get off the metro in Pigalle, why it matters. This is a French film, made for the French and for speakers of French. Films in New York? The Empire State Building looks like any other from the street level. None of the bridges are so remarkable, one from the next, Carnegie Hall is fairly chaste, Central Park might mean you’re near Harlem or midtown, Union Square and Columbus Circle aren’t particularly special…there’s a reason why films in New York show us the cityscape and then plant us on some anonymous street, which is that the physiognomy of New York isn’t ubiquitous in our hearts. What’s the difference between SoHo and Tribeca? But Paris? We don’t need to be told what to think when we see its streets, because it isn’t so fond of novelty as we are here. Vuillard was painting the cafe Wepler more than a century ago, it survived both wars and more than another sixty years. Pigalle means something, and it doesn’t change. Like the pyramids. Part of the charm of Paris is that it knows precisely what it is, and it doesn’t have to be, nor does it try to be, everything…it just has to be Paris. So Truffaut doesn’t have to tell us where he’s filming, he doesn’t have to describe the parts of town, because we already know them, they’re heavy with meaning.

The only other examples that I know of offhand are Blake’s cosmology being symbolically London-centric, and maybe even the Wizard of Oz being a metaphorical representation of the United States. The US doesn’t have any city that the world ‘knows’ but the country as a whole is subject to a fair number of stereotypes we’re all pretty comfortable with. And I continually return to the uncomfortable notion of London and Paris being important places…where else are we supposed to know? Didn’t the rest of the world have history too? That’s what I’ve heard. Yet looking at a map of the world’s major powers in the early 1500s, China’s stuck with ancestor worship, Japan’s essentially an eternal Sparta, Muscovy fairly isolated and otherwise interested in eastward expansion…I don’t know enough about the Ottoman empire to characterize it at all, but Western Europe has all its powers fragmented. But there’s London. And there’s Paris. England and France are the only two countries still recognizable on that map (and Spain and Portugal…but…um…)–it’s not just that those cities were there, as plenty were, but it’s the meaning that each of those cities held at the time, and that remains in our consciousnesses today, it’s their calm longevity in an otherwise frenetic western world.

Allen: A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1980)

I’m drinking my father’s beer, just pizzazzed up (shouldn’t the plural of pizza be pizzazz?) my mother’s stirfry with WHOLE WHEAT PASTA, lime juice, teriyaki sauce, tobasco, and sugar (it was DREADFUL…i’m so sorry), and this film made me laugh about things I wouldn’t have found humor in a decade ago.

“Can sex and love be different from each other?”
“Sure! Sex relieves tension and love causes it.”

Yo ho ho.

I was inspecting some toolbag’s bookshelves and found them to be remarkable in what can only be described as their retention. Goethe, Anais Nin, Hofstadter, how lovely to be well-read. And is it possible to, in this day and age, use it for evil? What with most of the fine educations, okay, all the fine educations, going to the well-endowed, mustn’t those without satin shoes and saffron condoms be at least of fortunate demeanor? I simply do not want to read anymore, not if it will turn me into a wrinkly arse, a mean-spirited so-and-so, an upstart crow.

Why shouldn’t Woody Allen make whatever films he pleases? And why shouldn’t he place himself in the lead? And why shouldn’t he remake classics to suit himself? He’s also prolific, which is an archaic concept, even for serious-minded graffitists. In the vast sea of collegiate dung, at least one can find a few diamonds, which the dung would claim were formed in the collegiate intestines, but which were truly just indigestible. Like twigs.

Better to be a twig than dung, but your salary won’t be nearly so high. So you probably won’t have healthcare.

Anyway, “Wooden Allen, or Artificial Exteriors” is written by Bert Cardullo in The Hudson Review, and he doesn’t even notice himself being mocked in Sex Comedy, as he writes with the same tone as Leopold speaks. Allen is a TV comic writer (mais si, si, I differenciate between comedic and comic, I’m a big pile of dung) and not worthy of sharing a sentence with Strindberg, the artistic godfather of O’Neill (who knew his place) and Bergman (whom Allen lathered up and shaved and smeared all the shaving-filth onto film and made his career, ah, ah)–Allen is clearly not the person we think he wants to be and is therefore a sympathetic puddle of redundancy, and and and and here’s another nine pages of what I think is important.

If only a fine education was expected and received by all…first, there’d be no Sarah Palin, and second, those of intellectual prowess would stop coddling the pricks of these useless critics whose life-experience begins and ends before their belly-button strings are thrown away. Senses and emotions, yes, indeed, those things bouncing around inside the plebs!

You know what I think of Ben Jonson? I walked out of a Ben Jonson performance. Senses and emotions, you can’t discuss them if you haven’t any yourself, you can’t appreciate the bouquet of wine when you can’t appreciate the bouquet of the earth at night, or the snow, or the deep autumn forest. But you can believe that’s precisely what you’re doing. And that’s culture. And you’re wrong, wrong, wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

And I might never read again.