{Ed. note: not everyone here agrees with Ms. Boutwell's evaluation of the Voice review mentioned below...}

Okay Wombat Filers, does anyone besides Mike and me think that the latest music review of Haystak and other white rappers, by N. Bedford Couch of the Village Voice, is just the most villanous piece of racist crap that the Voice has ever printed, or is it just the profound prissiness of the reviewer's musical taste that offends? Either way, you gotta wonder who let that one get in.

And Hippie Prof, this made me miss you. Good ole Latrobe. Interestingly, Australia's got down with the migration of skilled workers to its enticing shores - let the wombats unite to form a mighty empire.

You Can't Fight City Hall -- Satan!

What's nice about this is the way the town clerk manages to co-opt the language of feminist activists:

"We are taking everything back that the devil ever stole from us," Risher wrote. "We will never again be deceived by satanic and demonic forces."

Not Since Captain Morgan Got "Spicey"...

Liquor ads on the subway seem to gravitate to a particular kind of goofy misfire. Our current favorite set of brain-dead subway booze promos is for Rémy Red, a kind of cognac-with-koolaid mixture that, according to the good folks at Rémy Martin --

"...symbolises the energy of new desires, through an unexpected, lively and surprising mix of flavours. Desires expressed by a new urban generation in all the world's great capitals."

We believe we've spotted this new urban generation running around on the streets of various world capitals (we think they're the ones with the shoes we like), expressing their desires and such, but they never have the time to stop and explain these desires to us. Which means that we don't know what to get any of them for Christmas (oh, sure, we could just send Rémy Red, but that seems so unoriginal).

That above quotation is from the Rémy website -- which doesn't, alas, reproduce the evocative language which really make the subway ads work their head-shaking magic. Our favorite suggests that you "Stir Your Senses...from the Inside." Another offers a little gender analysis along the same theme of luxurious perception-indulgence: "A Man Has Five Senses. A Woman...Who Knows?"

We're 99% sure that something in the above is dirty. But maybe it's just us.

Life During Wartime

One of the niftiest entries in the Mirror Project that we've seen in a while.

Comments are, at least, functioning again. Alas, the colors are still a hash, and yes, the links to the right are, indeed, unreadable. Apparently somebody has been coming to in to work with tea-shades on.

Ignore it and look at this instead: a method through which you can finally avoid having your soul stolen by surveillance cameras.

Kurt Andersen Envisions the Future of Publishing

IWM: What should magazines do to recover?

Andersen: Behave more like Martha Stewart Living and Maxim, I guess -- take chances and put passionate, damn-the-torpedoes visionary geniuses in charge who are obsessed with giving readers what they want.

Ah, yes, the visionary genius that can save print publishing: lifestyle porn and softcore porn. Never would have guessed.

Later in the interview, when asked whether "content is still king," the Kurtster ventures "maybe a better analogy is: content is the pope, and the pipes are king." We would suggest that content is actually the Orthodox Primate, AOL Time Warner is the Holy Roman Emperor, and Matt Haughey is the Dalai Lama.

Those hardcore aesthetes over at the Childcare Action Project have weighed in with their characteristic scrupulous evaluation of the H____ P____ film . Every scriptural lapse, no matter how small, is weighed in the balance. The Jesus-Hater-Haters at CAP have always been good for a laff or sixty (not to say six-hundred and sixty-s-...oh, why do we even bother), due in large part to their unique combination of familiar fundamentalist rantery with a fantastically detailed, painstakingly objective rating system in which each film's individual sins are cataloged and made manifest in a set of EZ-to-use visual charts. (The latter half of this successful formula is not something that just comes along with religious fanaticism: Website construction seems to be a calling for obsessive-compulsives of all kinds).

We don't expect any new thrills from this kind of review of Potter, of course: it's old news. Everyone loves this sort of thing, right? We all bond together over the guy describing his inability to sit through the "nude lesbian licking kissing" spectacle that apparently comprises Mulholland Drive. Snickery over his "discomfort" is the kind of not-really-very-guilty pleasure we professional scoffers take (let's face it, hmm?) for granted.

What we like about the CAP review of the Pottermovie is that this is the only one we have seen from a person who has not read any of the books -- indeed, one for whom the plot was entirely a new discovery. There's a clear-headedness to the whole approach that yields a refreshing analysis. Put aside the foregone conclusion -- that the premise of the the whole thing is end-to-end Satanic -- and you get from the CAP reviewer a simple verdict: that the movie's pretty violent and -- visually speaking at least -- obviously derivative of the less-inspired Star Wars films. And not otherwise notable.

We couldn't agree more. And come to think of it, Mulholland Drive is pretty much about topless kissing licking lesbians.

for gastronomes on the go in NYC.

Deskateer

Adam’s whip, Alabama Marbles, ballyhack, barmaid, beaned up, bohunkus, bottle-assed, cackleberry, candy-leg, cat-wagon, chase the can, coffin varnish, Cokie Joe, cookie truck, corn up, creep game, darby, dehorn, deskateer, devil’s dandruff, dime-grind, dolly mop, dooteroomus, dunderfunk, eel’s ankle, eighty-eighter, elakazoo, face lace, fantods, fem-sem, fern, finif, fladge, flogger, foofoo, foozle, French blue, frip, fuck-nutty, gaged, gallyhoot, ganderneck, gaposis, gawnicus, gazooney, gloom bug, grette

Pardon us while we continue our recent obsession with word-lists. We just acquired a copy of the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, Vol. 1 (A-G), and we don’t think it’ll be long before we track down Volume 2. We’re horrified to learn that legal troubles are interfering with the publication of the third and final volume – RH has stopped work on the last volume and is engaged in a royalties struggle with the editor. Let us all pray that all parties come to an amicable settlement, and that nothing further interferes with our desperate need to have the complete etymology of yutz at our fingertips.

site.sight.cite

It is appropriate in this time of massive and confounding global upheaval to give thanks for the small things: for the Triplehom.coms of the web/world, where such vitally silly labors such as the task of compiling all of the triple homonyms findable in English are undertaken with care. The editors of this particular site show their love for precision by rejecting such pretenders as sordid/ sworded/sorted, noting pertinently, "To sword is not a verb."

We joke not, howe'er jovial we seem: It is the insistence on such principles which, though quixotic, may yet preserve civilization as the forces of ignorance and darkness close in about us like a swarm of gigantic, clumsy bees. It is for these souls and their obsessions that we give thanks, and humbly.

****

Reference

A wise friend of ours gave us a wiser wedding-present: a well-preserved old copy of a turn-of-the-century (the old turn-of-the-century) "Treatise" concerning "Drinks of All Kinds and of All Periods, Interspersed with Sundry Anecdotes and Reminiscences," written by one Edward Spenser and titled The Flowing Bowl.

Here in the editorial pit, as we approach and then whiz by our daily deadlines (sometimes without pausing), we are often in need of the kind of fortification which has sustained every great human endeavor. And the fact of the matter is that your bartender's guides of the modern world lack a certain depth, and indeed breadth -- one needs resources. The ancient knowledge. Lore, if you will.

One can get by without it: there's always the dusty bottle in the desk drawer to stave off madness as the cold sun sinks behind another wasted day. But what of the evening when a small triumph should be celebrated -- when a teensy victory of the spirit is snatched from the jaws of an otherwise predictable defeat? What of the midnight arrival of an unexpected friend, delivered by the last bus from nowhere, throat parched from a dusty road? Believe me, that's when you want a chap like Edward Spenser on your bookshelf. You need a man who can tell you how to make a Saratoga Brace-up, a Brandy Daisy, a Pope's Posset, or a big bowl of Uncle Toby for the boys down in rewrite.

Saratoga Brace-up:

Large tumbler, tablespoon sifted sugar, twelve drops of Angostura bitters, twelve drops of lemon juice, six drops of lime juice, twelve drops of anisette, one fresh egg and a wine-glass of old brandy. Half fill the glass with crushed ice, shake thoroughly, strain into another large tumbler, and fill up with Seltzer or Appolinaris water

Infinity

To carry on
To have and have not
To have and to hold
To go
To be true
To pledge allegiance
To take the piss
To sock it to me
To turn this mother out
To tell the truth
To bee or not to bee

Speaking of the seductions of coconut milk... found this site after visiting the newly renovated Asia Society, which is perhaps the most perfect museum design I've seen in a while. Please just go, if you're in New York. Hopefully the 21-piece Burmese drummer will still be there when you do. If you can't, there's always their website. But it's not the same.

***Technical note***

Truth

Walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn on this glorious autumn afternoon, we were overtaken by a desperate and temperamental herb dealer, wobbling his way down the sidewalk on a child's ten-speed bike. Fifth is not particularly prime territory for dealing -- at first we didn't know what this man riding lethargically behind us could have been on about. Finally, he rode right up beside us. He was balding and had an old-fashioned brushy moustache. “I got my last bag of reefer,” he hissed at us. “One last dime bag. You want it? You smoke?”

We shook our heads and said no -- meaning that we didn’t want his wares, not addressing that last question. But he thought we were trying to play the innocents. He pulled away and shot back with an angry rejoinder: “BUT YOU DID IN COLLEGE!” He pushed on ahead then, weaving through the crowd with what looked to be wisps of steam coming out of his ears.

Reconsiderations

About a week ago, with his typically deceptive straightforwardness, Rory announced that the most recent incarnation of his ongoing weblog, Walking West, was going to stop with its relatively brief fourth volume; instead, the author would devote himself to other projects long in the planning. "If you slice a cake too many times all you end up with is crumbs, and the last thing the world needs is another crumby weblog."

As usual, we read Rory with the mixed feeling that he's gotten to something important -- and something that should have been obvious -- well before we have, and expressed it better than we would have if we had gotten there. Crumbly crumminess does often seem like the State of the BlogNation (to say nothing of Blog Stagnation). And even here -- where our collective design skills have not advanced from the college days when we made cut-n-paste photocopy collages to promote unpopular bands -- we manage to waste considerable energy on the icing while the pastry goes quickly stale.

Rory's cake, however, has always been worth sampling. (Samples in fact still available.) We'll miss the very real pleasure of dropping in to grab whatever insightful commentary -- particularly on the recent international crisis and the war in Asia -- that he had time to post on a given day or week. We'll just have to look forward to enjoying the fruits of his newly concentrated labors.

Oft have we been visited by the Eohippus of Misplaced Destiny.

"As I write this node, it is erupting"

It's been a while since we rooted around over in the conceptual bins that litter the cavernous flea-market-of-ideas at everything2. God help us, we still really like the web.

The re-election of our current conservative government only heightens the poignancy of the recent documentary, Facing the Music, about funding cuts to the Music Department at Sydney University. Add to that, a recent nervous breakdown in my own department and the damn thing resonates far too much. See this film if you get the chance.

At long last: everything you always wanted to know about the file but were afraid to ask.

We've never before noticed just how deadly-looking the National Book Award trophy is. Careful with that thing, Jonathan: it's all a mildly vindicating triumph over Oprah's power in the literary marketplace, until somebody loses an eye.

Your Chance to Make the Most Delicious Soup Ever

A while ago we got a nifty recipe for Apple Crisp from Megnut. Feeling very “pay it forward,” today, we offer this formula for The Best Thing We’ve Ever Done With Lentils. You’ll thank us later.

Unspeakably Fine Lentil Soup With Garam Masala and Chiles

(Adapted without any permission from James Peterson’s Vegetables. Maybe he’ll forgive us if you buy the book.)

Ingredients:
1 onion, minced
3 garlic cloves, minced
4 jalapeno chiles, seeded and minced
1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger
3 tablespoons butter

Salt and pepper to taste

In a large pot, heat the garlic in 2 tblsp. of the butter over very low heat for a few minutes. Add the onion, chiles, and ginger. Increase heat to medium and stir until onions are translucent and soft but not yet brown.

Add the lentils, broth, and water (you can replace the broth with water, but the broth does add a lovely flavor); cover and simmer over medium-low heat until the lentils are fully soft. Small red lentils should take 25-30 minutes.

In a separate, small pan heat the remaining butter with the Garam Masala and the turmeric over low-medium heat for 1-2 minutes, until you can smell the fragrance of the spices. Add the resulting spice-butter combination to the lentils, and stir in the coconut milk.

To puree, use a blender or food processor (we like the very convenient Braun Handblender); use a food mill or a strainer to get it even smoother if you want (here we pressed it through a strainer, which was laborious but worth it). Return it to the pot and simmer, stirring in the cilantro and lime juice and season to taste with salt and pepper.

Serve over basmati rice. Or by itself with some warm flatbread on the side.

You can serve this immediately -- but it’s even better after 24 hours in the refrigerator.

* * *

If you like this recipe, you should get yourself a copy of Peterson's book, which is a capacious, thoughtfully assembled, easy-to-use, unpretentious, and just plain good cookbook. It is not at all vegetarian-centric: lots of recipes involving fish and meat (although the chicken stock in the above is all Wombat).

Time Regained

On a chill November evening in 1980, at soccer practice, one of my "teammates" -- a budding Southern cro-Magnon by the name of Kevin Harnes -- whimsically decided to huck a ball at serious velocity into the side of my invitingly wussified skull from a distance of about 2 1/2 yards. The result on my end was suprised humiliation garnished with pain; on his side was the pleasure of momentary admiration from our otherwise bored peers, who were happy to have a distraction from passing drills. When I attempted to enact some form of physical retribution on his body (protected as it was by a premature development of a football-ready combo of lumpish muscle and shock-absorbing fat), this future likely-Dittohead held me at a brawny arms length, while commenting on my inability to physically effect a readjustment of his karmic bank balance by sneering "Whut yoo gonna dooo? Hunh? Whut you gonna dooo?"

Kev, if you haven't been killed in a drunken hunting accident by now, this site's for you. Enjoy!

"At least I can tear my hair out full time now that I've been laid off."

If you haven't seen the latest installment of get your war on, we really think that you're wasting your time doing anything trivial such as working or breathing until you've seen it.

If you don't know what the fuck we're talking about, you might want to start with page one.

Conditions of Victory

Life no longer imitates art; it just imitates The Onion with increasing accuracy.

Morning After

Well, here we are: another all-too-believable election result. Here in the Gotham Bureau, we realize that it's probably silly to express much surprise at our fellow citzens’ choice. With the exception of the monstrous context of recent events, so much of the mayoral electoral outcome echoes last November’s triumph of confusion. Mark Green insisted on turning his governmental competence and political experience from an asset into a liability, and his self-confidence into arrogance, reminding us increasingly of Al Gore; Bloomberg’s affability and just-folks manner has provided an effective mask for both his membership in the Ruling Class and his goofy misconceptions about government; the recollection of a feckless, doofus Princeling (with a well-financed team of shrewd politicos) capturing the White House was unavoidable.

Where our naiveté kicked in: all the bets in this office (which favored Green by a hair) unconsciously factored in what we assumed would be a broadly shared dislike for Bloomberg’s breaking all records for campaign spending, saturating the airwaves with commercials, mailing videotapes to thousands of households (one came for one of my neighbors the other day), and generally equating having a load of money with the ability to manage the complexity of the city. Anyone who views with alarm our nation’s increasing swing towards becoming a Media Oligarchy might have (as we did) notice that Mark Green’s naked (and unpleasant to face) ambition has at least powered a career of public service, while Bloomberg merely represents the view that the rich must know a lot about everything (even if what they say suggests they know absolutely nothing), because they own a lot of everything.

Sigh. We know, of course, that there were probably more important reasons than people’s strange trust in the Big Bizness Mogul to explain why this happened: because of September 11, and his reassuring conduct since that date, Giuliani’s endorsement of his fellow Republican carried a unique weight for most people. Green got tangled in a very, very sensitive time with Fernando Ferrer in the primary, and whatever was left of the base that Democrats count on was pulled apart on the spot. Green never really recovered, and it was only his huge lead going into September that even left things close. Nobody knows much of anything, of course, about how Bloomberg will choose to run the city. Here at the File, we hope that our (reflexive) pessimism about that unknown quality is as off-target as our election predictions were.

Although it appears that Caesar is no more careful a typist than the lazy slob who does all the work here at the Gotham bureau, he does at least help us answer the eternal question, "Honey, where's the Map of Gaul?"

Expert Testimony

Reading Of Two Minds, T.M. Luhrmann's fascinating anthropological study of American psychiatrists, I'm reminded of the seduction of expertise. As I read about how young psychiatrists come to master the diagnostic categories and move into a comfortable ability to instantly spot or "feel" their way to an understanding of the patient's problem, I experience a familiar sensation, a profound envy of the specialist's ability to see "beneath" our ordinary reality and percieve a world different than the one I walk through.

I wonder how common this is. My fascination with experts and expertise doesn't come out of a desire for answers: or at least not fully. I'm rarely riveted by TV pundits, no matter how qualified, because making pronouncements and judgements seems like the purview of everyone with a mouth. But show me an essay or documentary which follows around a highly trained professional and shows them "thinking aloud" about a case, a problem, or a project, and I'm hooked, worshipful. I suddenly want nothing more than to be the dog trainer, the architect, the microbotanist, the safety inspector. I think "I could do that. I could study and study and eventually see that world." I want to speak the languages of spaniels and bridges and smallpox.

I attempt to comfort myself with the notion that I too am an expert of my own kind; I've read too many books not to be! I taught classes! I remember my advisor, in a conference I had with him during the purgatorial period through which my dissertation was painfully generated, admonishing me not to confuse my calling with that of an essayist or book reviewer. "We're surgeons!" he hissed at me. What was to others the unconsciously experienced body of literary history was, to us, a pulsing, finely detailed network of veins and muscles, to be laid open with the knife of the mind.

But the myth doesn't seem to hold. I read a book and I see the same thing that everyone else does: a story that I love or hate, or bores me, a character that reminds me of somene, a phrase that hangs in the ear for a few more seconds, a wise or naive or incomprehensible thought. I can discern structure in a novel or an essay, of course; I can spot a sestina and pin allusions to the wall. But to what end? A surgeon's vision into the patient sees the way things are and matches them against the way things ought to be. A mechanic listens to the engine of a car and hears the misfiring spark plug. I don't see under the surfaces of things: I'm paddling around right here in the shallows, pulled this way and that by word-currents which will never be anything other than opaque.

Green Party Activist Barred From Flight

There's not enough information in this story (more context available in the links available at MeFi), to thoroughly convince one that Nancy Oden was singled out for her political views. But let's hope this gets some attention, because it's becoming a pattern: traveler is singled out for search, traveler exhibits normal consternation in the face of M-16-toting soldiers, traveler is branded "uncooperative" and loses ability to fly in summary and fuzzily outlined fashion.

Dead Horse Receives New Wombat-Powered Beating

We hate to make the linguistic clumsiness of our national leadership our ruling obsession. But when it keeps falling into our laps we can't just can't help ourselves. Secretary of Closing the Barn Door After the Horse Is Gone Tom Ridge urges us to "Be alert, and go about the business of being in America." Isn't The Business of Being in America a Duke University Press title about the marketing of Heidegger to impressionable undergraduates?

And then there's the the President, who's still on the Hunt:

"Most Americans understand there is a new day here in America," Bush said. "We're hardening assets, we're on the hunt and we're going to chase them down."

Really, we're going to stop now. We're all done here.

Reverse-Engineered Iron Chef recipes. Now you can recreate the Mango Battle in your very own Kitchen Stadium.

One of Ours

Feel disconnected from the politicos clamoring for your vote? If you're in Manhattan, you've got the chance to throw your weight behind a Wombat-Friendly candidate for Borough President: it's the other Mike for Manhattan. The one who isn't trying to buy an election. It's a shame we don't have a candidate nearly so eloquent running out here in Brooklyn.

National Anxiety State

Our Double-Take Quote of the Day comes from the Attorney General in today's NY Times:

On Monday, Mr. Ashcroft issued a public warning of imminent terrorist attacks over the next week. He suggested today that the threat had not eased. "I have no reason to indicate that there is any reason for people not to be as careful as we have asked them to be," he said.

Thanks for the clarification. Aside from cute little syntactic puzzles like the above, this is what the paper is looking more and more like every morning: vague hints being presented as information, with so many qualifiers included that you have to read through twice to figure out whether police have (a) found a terrorist, (b) found a suspected terrorist, (c) suspected that they will find a terrorist, or (d) put on a list of suspects an organization accused of being connected to suspected terrorists.