Thinking about Brussels

 We are in Brussels.  It is wonderful to be here after three years (we were last here just before the pandemic, in Jan-Feb 2020) and I have been contemplating why I get so much happiness from just walking down the streets of this city.  In general I find attractive store windows delightful and  the architecture here is full of delightful surprises as well.  In contrast to US cities, I don’t see as many empty storefronts (though there are a few)… but I was thinking yesterday about how the shops I enjoy seeing most remind me of New York in my youth: stationery stores that are full of art supplies and colored paper, so many independent clothing stores… The street scape has not been taken over by banks and real estate offices.  

Such a pleasure to stroll.

NYC Gallery Hopping: Skarstedt Gallery

Last week I was in New York and as I was strolling down Madison Avenue from the Guggenheim, I kept seeing banners for a gallery show featuring Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georg Baselitz. I had a little time, so I looked up the address for the gallery, which is called Skarstedt. I had never been there.

Well, the gallery is quite spectacular, in a beautiful building--a mansion, really--on East 64th Street.  When I opened the door, I was so awed by the imposing architecture that I timidly asked the young women at the front desk whether the gallery was free for viewing. They said yes, so I entered and wandered about, flanked by a friendly security guard the whole time.

I was most delighted by the Basquiat paintings. His painting Early Moses especially amused, with Passover is coming up.

Basquiat's work has long intrigued me with its combination of apparent messiness, glorious color, frequent humor, and persistent interestingness. I found the Baselitz work only moderately appealing in comparison, though I could see some commonalities.

I haven't spent a lot of time browsing galleries in New York, but I may do it more in the future.  So many treasures!

FB Diet Ambivalence

For the past several months I've been off Facebook, mostly.  I haven't officially left, and I still wish folks a happy birthday (I get email reminders for that, which I value--I'd never remember otherwise), and on those occasions I visit, I strew "likes" and "loves" as liberally as ever, but I don't post, I've removed the apps from my phone and iPad, and I've un-liked and un-followed people and organizations even remotely political.

This has pluses and minuses, of course.  On the plus side, I no longer daily slide into a dark spiral, spurred by someone's posting of bad social or political news (or my perusal of the adjacent comments section).

(I have to say this does happen whenever I visit, though.  Even in my pared-down FB world, folks post political-social stuff, and other folks say mean, stupid, ignorant stuff.  And I just never get over my dismay at meanness, stupidity, and ignorance.)

Also on the plus side, I avoid a lot of advertising I don't need to see, I spend less time on a lot of trivial crap, and (related) I don't sit around wondering why more folks don't "like" or respond to my posts.

On the minus side, I feel somewhat less connected to friends and family.  I miss sharing special experiences on FB and miss the feeling of knowing at least where folks are  by what they are posting on FB. 

I am hoping to do more reaching out to folks individually (with letters and postcards, imagine that!) and writing more here to share special experiences, and doing more of my own creative work in general.  That is always an ambition, but not so easily realized.  We'll see.

I also feel like I miss part of the zeitgeist--what folks are thinking and talking about, what's interesting, what's funny. 

For example, today I went on FB (to wish someone a happy birthday, natch), and a distant friend posted a link to this excellent Pixar video, which I am so glad I saw. A member of a cooking interest group I belong to posted a link to this fabulous interview with Samrit Nosrat.  The interview reminds me of why I was so crazy about her book and love her whole personality.

So by avoiding FB, I also avoid this kind of stuff.  On the other hand, I've been sitting at my desk for more than an hour and haven't gotten any work done, so maybe it's really best to keep my FB interaction to very small doses.

A Roundup of Recent Performances

Victor and I have been busy lately.  We have seen so many good shows!

Most recently, we were at Garfield Park Conservatory with cousins Christel and Frank, from Germany.  We took them to see a Music under Glass performance by Lester Rey. Unfortunately the mic quality was terrible, but in spite of that, the excellent neo-Latin-soul-hiphop sound and spirit came through and we felt lucky to be there with such an enthusiastic audience. A bunch of groupies in front of us were dancing in their seats, and so eagerly begged for more at the end of the set that Rey invited two of them up to the stage, where they danced, sang backup, and played percussion.  Other audience members joined in the dancing during the encore also, making it a really special experience for our German guests, especially in the unique and stunning environment of the conservatory.

The other night, we took our guests to Jackalope's 10th Annual Living Newspaper Festival, which took place at The Frontier. We have been to a couple of previous iterations of this festival, which involves six of the hottest young playwrights (mostly but not entirely local, such as Ike Holter and Calamity West) and six very topical newspaper articles upon which they are each asked to base a 10-minute play.  A cast and director are selected and after two weeks of rehearsal, the festival (roughly 100 minutes long, allowing for intros, breaks in between plays and the fact that many of the plays exceed 10 minutes by a little or a lot) makes for a stimulating evening of theater.  Some of the plays are more successful than others, but a couple of them are stunning, and the short length means the bad ones are minimally painful.

Just before our guests arrived, we attended a wonderful dance performance at MCA, choreographed by hip-hop dance artist Rennie Harris. Called Lifted, this show told the story of a young boy raised in the church who considers the "wrong" path but ends up confirmed in his choice of the right one. Some of the storytelling was a bit simple (literal-minded) for me, but much of the music and dancing was really thrilling.  As I get older, I'm more and more astounded by what young bodies can do. 

And the evening before that, we were at Theater on the Lake, where we have spent many Friday nights this past summer and the summer of 2018.  The renovated theater has become a real gem of summertime in Chicago.  The curators of this series (this year Quenna Lene Barrett and Tony Santiago) have done an extraordinary job highlighting some of Chicago's most interesting and creative productions in these summer remounts.  (Aside: I just realized Tony Santiago was a cast member in one of my favorite segments of this year's 10th Annual Living Newspaper Festival.  He gets around!)

At any rate, this past Friday we saw a very moving production of Pegasus Theatre's Eclipsed, which took place in Liberia during its civil wars.  The writing, by actress-playwright Danai Gurira (she was one of the king's guard in Black Panther!) was just outstanding and the acting entirely lived up to the writing.  Just a gripping show.

The week before, we saw the thought-provoking and transformational Tangles and Plaques, by The Neofuturists. This play, created by Kirsten Riiber, attempts to demystify dementia.  And does a darned good job of it.

The night before, we went to a show created by Dahlak Brathwaite as part of the MCA New Works Initiative. The show, called Try/Step/Trip used dance, music, and theater to tell and reflect on the story of his incarceration for possession of psychedelic mushrooms. It is amazing how effectively movement can convey the physical impact of the criminal justice system.  Super compelling work.

Last week we took my brother (visiting from Buffalo) and our niece and nephew on a fireworks cruise that was a fundraiser for the Field Museum. We had never been on a fireworks cruise before and I have to say it was pretty awesome to be out on the water with such a direct view on the spectacle.  We would certainly do it again sometime.  Also, it being a Field Museum event, there were scientists and other Field Museum folks on the boat talking about their work.  I was especially interested in a woman who works with teenagers in a program called Roots & Routes, under the Field's Keller Science Action Center.  So good to know such great work is being done!

The previous weekend we saw a good documentary about Bill Traylor, the outsider artist who started painting in the 1939 when he was 85.  Unfortunately I slept through parts of it, but I was really tired so I don't blame the film maker.  I hope it will be on Netflix at some point so I can see it again.

That weekend we also saw True West at Steppenwolf. We had not been to a Steppenwolf show in quite some time--probably well over a year--and this production made us feel like we ought to go back a lot more often.  It was really outstanding.  We had never seen the play before--unlike longtime Chicago theatergoers who probably saw the 1982 Steppenwolf production with John Malkovich and Jeff Perry--but it was hard for us to imagine the previous production could have been better.  Just outstanding acting.

I'll cut this off here.  More later.

Vitamix Happiness

Not long after we got the Instant Pot, we purchased a Vitamix (2018 was a banner kitchen-gadget year).  I am not sure what inspired that purchase, but I suddenly got a feeling we ought to have one and spent a lot of time researching before choosing a model.

We have had a bad history with blenders.  We registered for one when we got married in 1997.  We hardly used it, but when we did try to blend some things, it died on us.  Some internal fuse blew out.  Figured we had a dud, and exchanged it.  The replacement behaved the same way.  We tried another brand.  No luck. After a while, we just figured we were not blender people. 

Victor had brought an immersion blender to our household, and we loved that. We generally used that when we needed to blend.  When it died, we replaced it with a similar model but that one was not as durable.  I then did a ton of online research and bought the DeLonghi immersion blender, which is super over-engineered.  Very powerful. We have been thrilled with it.

From my reading about the Vitamix, it seemed to be similarly over-engineered so I thought it would be a good fit for us.  In the event, it certainly is. 

We have never worried about straining the motor.  It crushes ice and other frozen stuff with ease.  It can turn an apple into juice in seconds.  It is easy to clean and looks good on the counter.

Smoothies are now a routine part of our lives.  And while the immersion blender does a fine job pureeing soups, when we need something to be really smooth, nothing beats the Vitamix.

On the Instant Pot Bandwagon

I forget how I learned about the Instant Pot.  I suppose I saw an ad somewhere. I did a lot of reading online (checking out reviews, videos, and competing products). I was excited by the thought of a multifunctional device (it can make yogurt!  it can hardboil eggs!), by the promise of dry beans cooked quickly without soaking, and by the option of sous vide (available with the Ultra model that I decided to purchase) (even though I still haven't attempted it).

I've owned the Instant Pot for around 15 months, and it has become one of the most heavily used appliances in my kitchen.  I don't use it daily, but there are few weeks that it doesn't get set on the counter and plugged in.

The most frequent use, which I had not anticipated, is the preparation of vegetable broth.  I save vegetable scraps in the freezer and whenever I run out of fresh vegetable broth I throw the scraps into the Instant Pot with some herbs and spices and three quarts of water. Set some dials and push a button, and forget about it.  Whenever I get back to it, there's at least three quarts of broth, ready for use in soups and other recipes.  Cleanup is easy, but my favorite part is that the pot doesn't have to be watched.  I can go out and do errands; the Instant Pot finishes cooking and then keeps the contents safely warm until I get back.

The next most frequent use is for beans. We eat mostly vegetarian at home, which means beans are a significant part of our diet.  They turn out well in the Instant Pot, though I still try to soak beforehand if possible, because everybody says this helps the beans cook more evenly.  Even without soaking, though, you can get a good result.

The third most frequent use is for soups and stews.  The Instant Pot has a saute feature, so you can saute aromatics and other ingredients before the pressure cooking step if needed (it's not necessarily dump and cook).  But once that's done, I love locking the top and pushing the button and not having to futz. You can give your attention to other parts of the meal, or just take a rest. 

Finally, I've found the Instant Pot is a great partner for Indian food. Maybe the Instant Pot presses the spices into the food with more force? I don't know, but the Indian food I've made in the Instant Pot (saag, chickpea masala) turns out especially tasty. I've used recipes from the Internet as well as Urvashi Pitre's Indian Instant Pot Cookbook.

One really helpful resource for vegetarian cooking with the Instant Pot has been Lorna Sass' Complete Vegetarian Kitchen. This was written before the Instant Pot craze, but Sass has been a pressure cooker proponent for many years.  Most of her recipes include instructions for both pressure cooker and conventional equipment.  I have found the recipes pretty reliable and tasty.

The Instant Pot has turned out to be one of my favorite purchases for the kitchen.

Sexism Visible

I am a science fiction fan, and I am a mystery fan, and I am also a fan of book deals, so I subscribe to the Amazon Kindle Daily Deals list.  When books are two or three bucks, you tend to be open to trying new things.

Or old ones.  I've had a tendency to purchase books by classic science fiction and mystery authors whose titles I remember seeing on the shelves of the used bookstore I worked at in Boston. Stuff that was popular in the 70s and 80s. The series about the rabbi detective; the series about the journalist with a cat; the wizard in spite of himself, and so on. Some of them are remarkably decent.  Certainly I was pleasantly surprised by the Dorothy Sayers mystery series and Agatha Christie.

Lately I have found, though, that any narrative pleasure is severely diminished by the rampant sexism in these old genre stories--even those written by women! Maybe it is the Me Too movement, or maybe I am just getting old(er) and (more) curmudgeonly.  I no longer have patience for characters who judge women by the attractiveness of their bare knees (or more erogenous features).

I am aware of the recent hullabaloo in the fantasy/science fiction fan universe over the increasing popularity and success of feminist, gender- and race-inclusive, and politically concerned work.  Such work has always been among my favorite (I'm thinking of Ursula K. LeGuin, here, but there are certainly others) and I am glad that more of it is being recognized now.

As for series like The Cat Who... and The Warlock in Spite of Himself, I'm just done.  I guess that stuff used to be invisible to me.  Maybe the impact of Me Too is that none of it is invisible anymore.

Please Continue (Hamlet) at MCA Chicago

Victor and I went to see Please Continue (Hamlet) yesterday at the Museum of Contemporary Art stage. The show was presented as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, of which we are big fans. It consists of the trial of someone named Hamlet, for the knife murder of someone called Polonius, the father of a young woman named Ophelia, Hamlet's former girlfriend, and witnessed by Hamlet's mother, who is named Gertrude.

While this all feels familiar, these characters live in a rough neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, in our own time, where rats run rampant in public housing, it is natural for a young man to carry a knife for defense, and before his return at the death of his father (Hamlet Sr.), young Hamlet had been away in Georgia with his uncles, trying to get his life straight, free of the challenges and distractions of ghetto life.

The trial is conducted with an actual Chicago-area judge, prosecutor, defense attorney, medical examiner, co-counsel, and court clerk.  The jury is randomly selected from the audience. Each performance makes use of a different set of legal profesionals; however, the defendant (Hamlet) and key witnesses (Ophelia, Gertrude) are portrayed by actors.

The entire show can exceed three hours, but it is remarkably gripping.  While most of us are familiar with the bare bones of Hamlet's story, the details of what he's accused of here, and how the prosecution and defense build their cases, are fascinating.  Certainly the possibility of being chosen for the jury also compels the attention.  Audience members are provided with memo pads and pencils to take notes.

In Chicago, Hamlet was charged with two counts of first-degree murder.  Intent to kill or grievously harm was cited as key to the charges.  While those of us familiar with Shakespeare's play know that Hamlet didn't intend to kill Polonius, he did intend to kill his uncle Claudius, who he thought was hiding behind a curtain while he argued with his mother.  In this play, though, Hamlet and his mother claim they heard a rat scurrying behind the curtain; Hamlet, quick as thought, stabbed his knife where he thought the rat was and was shocked to realize he'd struck Polonius.

Then followed a day of coverup, before the police got involved and were first lied to and then confessed to.

We saw the last performance of this production in Chicago; it was first performed on Thursday night, when State's Attorney Kim Foxx represented the prosecution.

Before seeing the performance yesterday, I breezed through Chris Jones' review in the Chicago Tribune. From this I learned that Kim Foxx had not stayed beyond her opening statement, and that the colleague she left behind was not able to get a conviction.  According to Jones, this was quite rare ("he'd hardly ever gotten off before"), which enabled Jones to contribute to the mythology of a Chicago where victims can't get justice, and where Kim Foxx lets criminals slide.  The headline reads "...Kim Foxx lets Hamlet beat a murder rap."

The truth is that around half of the Please Continue (Hamlet) trials end in acquittal.  Among the trials with guilty verdicts there have been a wide range of results, including alternate charges (in Chicago Saturday night, Hamlet was convicted of manslaughter), and sentences of less than a year to more than 15 years.

Part of the point of this production, actually, is to convey the arbitrariness of the legal system--how the performances of the various parties in the case (witnesses, attorneys, judges, and juries) critically influence the outcome, so that the fate of the defendant is not so much about the facts as we like to think.

Chris Jones apparently missed this point. He was too busy trying to ding Kim Foxx and contribute to the meme of Chicago corruption and impunity. And also to put his two cents in about the prosecution's failure to note that a rat is not as tall as a man.

Regardless, I was delighted that the jury quickly acquitted Hamlet yesterday afternoon (even though our prosecutor repeatedly brought up the rat/human size discrepancy).  The question was not whether Hamlet's rat story was believable, but whether the prosecution had proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt.  And (in our opinion) it had not: Ophelia was the only witness presenting damning evidence against Hamlet and she was not convincing.

Anyhow, I was grateful for a piece from the Guardian that usefully discusses the show.

Please Continue (Hamlet) was created by the European theatermakers Cie Yan Duyvendak and Roger Bernat and has appeared at theaters and festivals around the world in the past few years. Kudos to MCA Chicago for bringing the production here.

Keeping Track of Cookbooks

I just learned about this terrific Web site called Eat Your Books.  It's a service that indexes cookbooks.  It may seem pretty random, but if you have a lot of cookbooks, and you cook a lot, it is sometimes hard to remember where a recipe you cooked once came from.  And going through your cookbooks to find it can be a chore--again, if you have a lot of cookbooks, and also if you have a tendency to distinctly remember things incorrectly.

For example, the other day I was wanting to make a vegetable soup I had cooked before.  I remembered it had lettuce.  I also remember it had no added water--rather, you stacked all the vegetables in the pot and cooked it slowly so the vegetables gave off their own water. 

I was pretty sure this was from one of Mark Bittman's books.  I remembered he referred to another cookbook writer for this recipe.  I looked quickly through my Bittman books and didn't find it.  Then I tried this site.

I searched for Bittman, lettuce, vegetable soup. No dice.

I tried to remember the name of the other cookbook writer.  I thought maybe it was Mimi Sheraton.  I looked up Mimi Sheraton, vegetable soup. No dice.

Then I decided to assume I was wrong about almost everything.  I looked up vegetable soup, lettuce.  And there it was.  Nika Hazelton's Garden Vegetable Soup, from Arthur Schwartz' Soup Suppers. A favorite cookbook of mine for more than 20 years.

Convinced, I bought a subscription ($30/yr) and quickly loaded in all my cookbooks.  Not all of them have been indexed yet, but many of them have.  What this means is, I get more use out of my cookbooks.  When I am not sure how I want to cook, say, a bunch of haricots verts, I can do a search for these on My Bookshelf and see the names and sources of most of my haricot vert recipes.  Instead of just looking randomly on Google (which is OK, too, but doesn't leverage my cookbooks).

Anyhow, I am delighted, looking forward to finding surprises in my own cookbooks, and getting further inspiration for my culinary adventures. And when I have time, maybe I'll help out by offering to index a few of my not-yet-indexed volumes.

Mick Herron's Slough House

Wow, this series of books is addicting! It is about a department of MI5 which is used as a holding pen for agents and staff who have screwed up or are screwed up and can't be fired for one reason or another.  They are given mind-numbing, pointless tasks in the hope that they'll quit.  None of them do, mostly because they're hoping to be reinstated to the "A" team, even though they know that is unlikely.

The man in charge of Slough House, Jackson Lamb, is one of the most entertaining characters ever.  He is a legendary former "joe," or field agent, who worked behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. The Cold War being over, he now mans a desk. That he mans this particular desk (managing a group of screw-ups) relates to a job he did at the end of his tenure as a field agent.

Jackson Lamb is a rude, farting, belching, genius at reading people, interpreting events, and spotting weak points. His sarcastic remarks frequently have me laughing out loud.

While the staff of Slough House (nicknamed "Slow Horses," in a punning reference to their headquarters) are not supposed to be active agents, in each volume of this series action somehow finds them, and a huge part of the pleasure of the book is watching these persistently depressed and underestimated people blossom as they exercise their talents.

I have seen Mick Herron referred to as a new Le Carre. I don't know if I buy that comparison.  But Herron's sharp observations of agency politics and office interactions are a pleasure to read, and the twisty plots are also great fun.

Unsubscribed

After years of getting so many emails, from stores I no longer shop at, political organizations I really don't want to hear from, and restaurants that I ate at once, I am unsubscribing with determination.

For a long time I kept the political emails because I was an inveterate petition signer.  But having been persuaded that petitions don't really make a difference (for the issue being addressed), those emails (so many!) became just so much spam.  In the current environment, I am really trying to avoid outrage triggers.  They are so ubiquitous!

So my email box is becoming a lot leaner and we will see how my anxiety levels respond over the next weeks.

Hell or High Water

I was provoked by this review of the movie Hell or High Water by Richard Brody. In the same review, he wrote about War Dogs, which I have not seen and know nothing about (as opposed to Hell or High Water, which I saw and admired); he says both movies demonstrate "exemplary badness." What he means by this seems to be that they are clockwork entertainments, not a piece out of place, predictable in certain ways, and without eccentricity (except the couple he identifies and immediately discounts). He seems to be criticizing them for being overwritten, too driven by their (good) intentions, failing to give their performers room to create.

He puts these movies in the same category with The Big Short and Spotlight, two of my favorite of 2015--which also happen to be movies with missions.  I didn't see Hell or High Water as a movie with a mission; just a caper with a satisfying backdrop and a satisfying emotional hook.

Unlike Brody, I didn't find the actors' performances incapacious (Brody is careful to make an exception for Jeff Bridges--everybody adores Jeff Bridges); most of them succeeded in intriguing me. Throughout the movie I found myself nodding at the dialogue, thinking to myself, This guy can write.

Maybe that means the movie was overwritten, but it was pleasurably overwritten. I feel that way about some of the Coen brothers movies, too; certainly about Mamet movies,

I feel funny writing enthusiastically about a movie that, I admit, isn't great. But I do think it is good.  That is, it tells an interesting story well. It engages and transports the viewer. I agree that Jeff Bridges is outstanding in it. He has such a charismatic presence that he's outstanding in everything; like the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, or the living Mark Rylance, when he's on screen, he's all you want to pay attention to. But unlike some movies I can recall--in which, when the charismatic actor left the screen I wanted to leave the theater--I remained invested in the film even when the story turned to the two brothers played by Chris Pine and Ben Foster.

While Brody's review of these films objects to their overt politics, a few months ago I came across another negative Brody review of a movie I liked, The Lobster, which criticized it for the opposite reason: he seemed to think a Greek director had no business making a movie that failed to reflect the Greek political situation.

I guess I just am not going to agree with this critic.

Great Andrew Yang exhibit at MCA

Andrew Yang's current exhibit at MCA Chicago is both beautiful and thought-provoking. It is one of my favorite kinds of contemporary art--both intellectually stimulating and aesthetically pleasing. Yang has a background in science as well as art and holds positions at both the Field Museum of Natural History and the School of the Art Institute, His work combines these dual interests, which many would find mutually exclusive, in explorations of cosmology and natural history that remind us that human beings and our culture are also part of the universe studied by scientists, whether we're studying (for example) chemistry, geology, or astronomy.

In one piece, Stella's Stoichiometry (all things being equal, 6 lbs 3 oz.) (2012), Yang beautifully arranges substances representing the chemical composition of his newborn daughter in glass receptacles. In another, A beach (for Carl Sagan), Yang represents the Milky Way with a scale model made of piles of sand--seven tons of sand; one grain for every star (assuming 100 billion stars, a low-end estimate).

Yang's work tends to juxtapose items that we generally don't think of together (like lava flows and human placentas, as in placenta/lava (2011), so we notice similarities we might never have looked for, and wonder about their coincidence. While we have likely studied geology and biology separately in school, some unspoken relationship between the two seems apparent here.

Similarly, in the installation the Way within (2016), Yang has arranged a large quantity of collected stones, shells, fossils, and manmade objects. Confronted with this miscellany, we wonder about the relationships between these objects--why they belong together, or don't.

The exhibit opened yesterday and closes 31 December.  I look forward to returning frequently.

Life without a Landline

I didn't actually turn off our landline until late last week.  I was a bit scared to.  After sending a notice to our friends and family, I changed our phone number with our credit card companies and a few other places but I kept worrying that I'd forgotten something important.

Now that the landline is gone, it's a bit quieter at home.  We used to get several spam calls each day (marketing calls, surveys, political and charitable solicitations); now we don't get any.  When I first opened my Google Voice account there were a few spam texts, but after I blocked those senders we were not bothered again.

One thing that annoyed me about not having a landline was needing to carry my phone around the apartment. I generally keep my phone in a purse, not my pocket.  I don't always have a pocket.

Then I remembered reading about connect to cell cordless phones. These phones use Bluetooth to link with your cell so it can stay in one place charging and you use the cordless handsets strategically placed around your home to make and receive calls. You don't have to have a landline to use them. I ended up buying a VTech model and it is working well for my phone. Unfortunately, even though it is supposed to be able to connect to two different cell phones and even appears to do so (the linking process goes smoothly), Victor's phone doesn't make the VTech handset ring.

Not a big deal, though, since Victor is used to carrying his cell phone everywhere.

We haven't had much occasion to use Google Voice yet, but I did give the number to a department store salesperson a couple weeks ago and thus had an opportunity to experience this cool feature in which Googlebrain transcribes voicemail and texts it to you.

The transcription was perfect!  We are definitely living in the future!

Caught by Sideshow Theatre

We saw Sideshow Theatre's Caught at the Victory Gardens theater last weekend. While we didn't enjoy this one as much as the two other Sideshow productions we've seen (Idomeneus and Stupid Fucking Bird), we found ourselves discussing it a good deal afterwards--it's a tricky play--not at all obvious what it "means."

The set includes a selection of what appears to be contemporary Chinese dissident art, which the audience is encouraged to walk on the stage and view as if the stage is a gallery. Afterwards, the artist is introduced (we may have seen the recent New Yorker profile of him) and gives a talk reflecting on his artmaking, which led to a stint in a Chinese prison. Then we see a conversation among the artist and the writer of the New Yorker profile and her editor. There are concerns about whether elements of the artist's story are true.

This is followed by a conversation between the actor who played the New Yorker profile writer and the young Chinese woman who wrote the preceding scene and actually created all of the artwork on the stage. The artist-playwright references real-life conflations of expectations of truth with fiction such as Mike Daisey's The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs and fake-memoirist James Frey. She talks about how American ideas of "truth" are different from those of other cultures and how proud we are of own "truthfulness." However, she wonders whether our fixation on facts enables us to ignore more substantial issues. The conversation is at first friendly and then fraught, as the theoretical jargon spouted by the artist-playwright completely confounds the actor, who just wants to know what the point of it all is.

The final scene involves two Chinese-Americans at home (the actors include the one who played the male dissident artist in the beginning and the female artist-playwright in the previous scene). These characters have created everything that preceded this scene in tribute to a dissident artist--their mentor--who died in a Chinese prison. After they congratulate themselves on an excellent performance they begin to quarrel about proper interpretations of their mentor's legacy and eventually realize that they each had relationships with the mentor that the other didn't know about. The mentor fooled them both.

So the play is very obviously (perhaps too obviously) about how we get hung up on "truth." And as we watched it I think we felt that it really was much too obvious.

But in retrospect the way each scene builds on what happened before--rather like covering over an onion, instead of  unpeeling it--does make you seriously reflect. Throughout, you are sort of wondering--is this really the play now?  Is that really the artist?  Is there really such a person?  Is the art real, or was it just made up for this play? (Throughout, the assertion that the show is a collaboration with a gallery is repeated in various iterations.)  What does that even mean? As the artist-playwright would say, it's not the point. Afterwards you're replaying it all in your head, wondering whether or when what's true really matters.

Very thought provoking play.  Well worth seeing.

The School of Life

I just discovered the School of Life. Recently I read one of its publications, How to Worry Less about Money, which I found surprisingly helpful, It was more like a philosophy book than a self-help book, which you would think would make it less useful, but actually when it comes to worrying, philosophy is extremely helpful, because it is all about how to think about things. (When you worry, you are often thinking about things the wrong way.)

The School of Life is something I wish were headquartered in Chicago instead of London. It purports to be about building emotional intelligence, but it's basically a consulting philosophy business. There's a Youtube channel that includes videos about Plato, Doestoevsky, and (a favorite of mine) Secrets of Happiness in 60 Seconds. You can book (pun intended) a bibliotherapist to get a reading prescription for what ails you. And you can scan the calendar and wish you lived in London to be able to take advantage of the in-person program. Some of it is too targeted to corporate customers for my taste, but many of the offerings sound just wonderful. For example, "How to Stay Calm," "Mastering the Art of Kindness," and "Drawing as Therapy."

It's exhilarating to imagine that a business like this can thrive--that there are enough people interested in enlarging their worldview. For people who can't--or don't want to--enter an academic philosophy program, and for those wrestling with a wide range of personal and social crises and concerns, the School of Life offers injections of philosophy designed to address the underlying issues.

I look forward to exploring more of what's available on TSOL's Youtube Channel, site, and online shop.

What Good Is a Landline?

This month finds me contemplating getting rid of our landline.  It costs us about $300 a year, with taxes and fees, and seems mainly a vehicle to receive marketing and fundraising calls. Further, for the past year our phone service has been supplied by our cable provider--that is, the landline is more of a "landline."  It won't work when the electricity goes out, which used to be a reason to keep at least one phone plugged into the wall.

When my deaf mother was alive, I couldn't seriously consider getting rid of our landline because the TTY device I used to communicate with her weekly required a landline and I couldn't find an analogous device that would work with a cell phone. I imagine that's because deaf people who use cell phones likely just text each other--the market for those who want to use a cell phone with a TTY must be vanishingly small.

When you Google "should I get rid of my landline?" the chief objections seem related to emergencies.  In our current situation, as I mentioned, we aren't protected from an electrical outage. We have no children, so we don't need to worry about young kids (presumably without their own cellphones) needing to contact someone in a crisis. We generally don't have trouble keeping our phones charged so the "emergency" of running out of battery seems less applicable.  Plus, we have additional devices that can make calls over the Internet (Skype, Facetime) should the phones die. Of course, if the Internet died, we'd be screwed, but that would be true with our current "landline" also.

I didn't see any discussion of my main concern--not wanting to give either of our cell numbers to credit card companies, political and charitable organizations, and so forth.  Also, wanting a number that represents our household as opposed to only my husband or only me.

The answer to that seems to be Google Voice.  So I think this week I am going to take the plunge: get a Google number, let folks know we have a new number, and drop the landline.

(deep breath)

Will update on how it goes.

Being Your Own IT Department Can Be a Drag

I am the person in our household who understands computer and networking technology best, which seems pretty laughable. It is not that I understand these things well, but that even though my husband is an engineer, he's not that kind of engineer. Also, he doesn't apply himself to understand computers and networking--he doesn't need to. At work he has a real IT department to worry about that stuff and at home he has me.

So when the problems of last week recurred (my docked Windows laptop couldn't get to the Internet through its ethernet connection), it was on me to fix. Victor had already complained that his laptop was unable to get to the Internet via our home wireless network; I discounted his complaints because all my devices managed to access the Internet via wi-fi just fine and he has a cellular connection that he can use when wi-fi is unavailable.

This morning, testing revealed that while my iDevices (including the iMac) connected to the Internet--wired and wi-fi--the Windows laptop couldn't do it, nor could the Roku.  I didn't take the time to check the Apple TV--we use it very little.  But I guess--since it is an iDevice--that the Apple TV would have worked fine. I recall that was true last week.

Many power downs and power ups later, there was still no positive change. Except one: my laptop's wi-fi connection returned!  Mystified by why or how, but even though the connection returned the laptop could not reach the Internet through the network.

Changing Ethernet cords around didn't do any good, either; nor did (for example) connecting the Roku directly to the router instead of to an Ethernet switch. Since the problem came and went, I wondered whether the router, which is a few years old, might be going bad.  So I switched it with the router provided by the cable company.

The substitute router worked seamlessly for the iDevices and didn't make a bit of difference for the other devices. Worse--it broke Sonos.

It is another bad-weather day, and I would have been inclined to think that's what caused the trouble, but Victor was so disdainful of this conjecture when I brought it up a last week that I did some googling on the subject and learned that he is likely correct to be disdainful.

The inconsistency of the problem was particularly aggravating. The Power Over Ethernet adapter in the dining room worked fine (that's where the iMac is connected) while the one in my office (where my laptop was connected) was failing to convey the Internet signal.

Another thing bugged the hell out of me.  When I manually connected to "My Network" it became "My Network 2" after connection. There is no "My Network 2."  This had happened when I tried to troubleshoot Victor's laptop also.

Then I thought about what had changed recently. One thing is that I have been beta testing some software. That didn't seem relevant to network issues. The other thing is that I added a new Apple Airport Express to our network to support AirPlay with Sonos.

And suddenly, I thought, that's it. The Airport Express creates a wireless network; it's creating some kind of interference in the dining room (where it was connected to a Sonos speaker) and the non-iDevices are trying to get Internet from there  instead of the router, as if the Airport Express were a network extender.

This proved to be the case. Once I disconnected and unplugged the Airport Express from the Sonos device and restarted everything, everything functioned properly.

Except Sonos.  To bring back Sonos, I had to revert to the original router. Some day I will devote some time to figuring out why that is.

Another day I will also devote some time to understanding why the Airport Express should have caused a problem when (I am pretty sure) I had turned off its wi-fi broadcasting capability.

But enough hours have been spent on all this today. I would much prefer if I had someone knowledgeable to call on when stuff like this happens.  All this technology is fabulous when it works. When it doesn't it's incredibly disruptive.

I had so many things to do today and now I just want to go lie down.  

Goodbye, Unlimited Data

When I first got an iPhone, more than five years ago, AT&T was the only cellular provider partnering with Apple, and they offered an unlimited data plan for it. Later, as additional carriers partnered with Apple offering different deals, AT&T stopped offering unlimited data plans to new customers; however, I was grandfathered in as long as I didn't change plans or carriers. I was pretty proud of having been smart enough to have an unlimited data plan even though the achievement had nothing to do with smarts and everything to do with timing. I stuck with AT&T through multiple iPhone replacements in part to preserve my access to an unlimited data plan.

Recently I AT&T alerted me that the cost of my plan (which had been the same for the entire time I've used an iPhone) is going up. This prompted me to check out other options, and it turns out that AT&T is now offering a 2GB data package that costs substantially less than I now pay for unlimited data.  When I checked, I learned that my average monthly data use is less than 1GB; I approached 2GB in only one billing period in the past year.

When I was new to smart phones, an unlimited data package seemed like a great option because I had no idea how much data I would use and was afraid of being dunned crazy amounts of money for using Google on street corners. Now that I know I rarely exceed 1GB data a month, I don't need to pay more for the "insurance" of unlimited data.

So, goodbye unlimited data!  

Yet Another Purple Carrot/Meal Kit Delivery Update

We are still pretty big fans of the Purple Carrot though we continue to be troubled by all the packaging materials and the fact that the stuff is being sent to us from halfway across the country. The quality of the recipes is just excellent, and almost every recipe includes a new (to us) ingredient or technique, making our membership feel like a cooking class.

For example, we had not cooked much before with tofu products, and never with seitan, so it's nice to have excellent recipes that highlight really tasty uses for these products. A technique that surprised and then excited us was searing portabella mushrooms in a pan alongside a cut lemon.  The lemon's juice makes its way into the mushrooms without your squeezing it; you end up with a beautiful charred lemon for garnish and a remarkably delicious pan-grilled portabella mushroom.

There has been a lot of variety in the recipes so far, which has makes cooking (and eating) more exciting.  A lot of international influences (from Japan to Morocco to New Orleans) are evident, as is a bias toward seasonal ingredients (such as root vegetables and winter squash in December).  And it is a great convenience that hard-to-find ingredients not stocked at the local grocery store (such as fresh curry leaves) are included in the box.

Still, even with a somewhat relaxed holiday schedule, we fell behind, so I have put the delivery service on hold to give ourselves a chance to catch up. There are two meal kits in the fridge right now, and I have plans to make a meat-based dish (the traditional Eastern European Jewish cassoulet called cholent) tonight since the temperature has dropped so much lately.

Because of our travel schedule, we will probably keep The Purple Carrot suspended till the second part of February, at which point we may finally check out Lighter, A review I found online made it sound somewhat more personalized than Purple Carrot--you can tell them what you already have at home (for example, a can of pinto beans, or ground turmeric) so they don't send you unnecessary stuff.

I had researched other services such as Meez and Blue Apron, but these don't interest me as much, both because the vegan offerings are not as attractive and (at least in Meez' case) they use prepared sauces.  That makes me feel like I'm not doing the cooking. While I understand it's a convenience intended to make my own cooking go quicker, I'd rather take more time and cook it all myself.