A Second Judith

The New York Times sounds disappointed at how much time women spend at not-home

2009-08-05T03:17:00.000-07:00

The New York Times published an interesting graph about how Americans spent their time in 2008.

Disappointingly, you can't filter by multiple variables -- you can look at "black" and "high school graduates" and "age 15-24", but not, for example, "Hispanic women with a postgraduate degree".

The "women" filter has this annotation:

At any point during the average day, more than 80 percent of women are doing something other than household chores or caring for children.

This is nonsensical and weird. Did I say weird? I meant stupid. It is stupid that, even though the data shows and the sentence technically states that most women are not doing traditional housework and childcare, our activities are still defined in relation to...traditional housework and childcare.

Do you have something better to do? Huh? Didn't think so.

Sainsbury's Local, Tottenham Court Road

2009-07-22T15:27:00.000-07:00

That's the kind of ready meal I'm talking about.

Austen and Arrogance and Exploitation

2009-07-15T10:24:00.001-07:00

I am less than thrilled to see that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Jane Austen/gore flick mashup novel that came out earlier this year, is receiving sequel treatment in the form of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

"Whaaaaat? But it's about clever Regency ladies fighting zombies! Why the hate?" you may ask.

Hey, I love clever ladies kicking ass, too! But I love clever ladies kicking ass in the real world. The "Austen & Male Rewriter & Monsters" formula is no way empowering. Quirk Books, a male-edited and owned publishing line, is hiring male authors to co-opt women's fiction and marginalise women's voices to achieve press, visibility and shitloads of money. And I mean shitloads of money. New York Times-bestseller-list, movie-deal shitloads of money.

And they do it by stomping all over women's genre fiction. The authors handwave a bit about how Austen is a "brilliant" writer and blah blah blah, but far more frequent are comments such as:

"Traditionally, men tend to avoid Austen, dismissing it as chick-lit. Certainly, the BBC's acclaimed adaptation in the 1990s did nothing to counter this with its almost gratuitous shots of Colin Firth in his britches, designed to draw in the oestrogen-fuelled female audiences."

(Anthony Harvison, some idiot reviewer)

NOW WE KNOW: Colin Firth diving into a lake in old-fashioned trousers = sop to the hysterical underpants-flinging girls. Halle Berry's boobs in Monster's Ball, Mena Suvari's boobs in American Beauty, Brenda Vaccaro's boobs in Midnight Cowboy = Oscar-winning art. Got it.

"Most people have a great sense of humour about it, particularly the 'Jane-ites', who must prefer this to the 60th or 70th Mr Darcy's private thoughts collection that seems to come out every year."

(Seth Grahame-Smith, co-author, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies)

He is referring to the female authors have been writing derivative fiction based on the works of Jane Austen for at least 160 years. Pemberly.com, a Jane Austen fansite, has a list of 68 sequels and continuations, 61 of which were written by women. The first was published in 1850. Re-envisioning and rewriting Austen's novels is not some new edgy trend; it's just that the media has only started to pay attention to it now that male authors are co-opting it and putting it into traditionally male frameworks. "I think we've started a mini-trend of literary mash-ups," Grahame-Smith said in a BBC interview. No you haven't! And you know you haven't, because you were talking about all those other lady-penned reworkings like five seconds ago!

Solution
So ladies, I think we need to do some co-opting right back.

Presenting...

Saving Private Ryan From Her Dead-End Desk Career
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Tailored Trousersuits
Full Metal Jacket and Cubic Zirconia Earrings
Gladiator Sandals are Actually Really Uncomfortable
Dye Hard: One Knitter's Craft Fair Struggle
The Great Escape out of a Lower Salary Band
Blade Runner, Speed-Skating Ice Dancing Champion

Let's go, big movie houses! I can knock out a few spec scripts by Monday.

Five red wines under £5

2009-07-13T08:21:00.000-07:00

Like many other urban social butterflies, I am sure, this weekend I found myself walking that tightrope between "good guest" and "financially solvent". I had three house parties scheduled, which was very exciting! However, house parties, while cheaper than going to the pub, still carry the etiquette of BYOB.

While some supermarkets have fairly inoffensive own-label booze ranges, the recession has not yet hit deep enough to be able to waltz into a dinner party with a box of Tesco Basics "Australian Red" and a fistful of straws.

But, as I have discovered in my lengthy searches up and down the Sainsbury booze aisle, there are still lots of supermarket wines that are both tasty and affordable. We'll call them "social climbers".

5. Canaletto Pinot Noir (£4.49)

Italian. I am usually not a fan of reds with strong cherry flavors, because of cough syrup flashbacks. But this one has really lively light fruit flavors that keep you from feeling like you're five years old and gagging on a spoon. Fairly easy-drinking. Also, its website is hilariously ESL, describing "soft and gently tannins" and announcing that "Our aim is that each Canaletto wine should be a direct reflection of its terroir".

4. The Little Penguin Shiraz (£4.69)

Australian. Firstly, the name is adorable and the label is super-cute too, which in wine is half the battle. At least, it is the way I do it. Little Penguin Shiraz is a little spicy and dark, and it is one of the few under-£10 wines I've had that is tangy and intense without going overkill on the oak. I would pair it with barbecues and bad ideas.

3. Casillero del Diablo Cabernet Sauvignon (depends)

Spanish. How much do I love Cab Sauvignons? They're so friendly. I think this wine is technically like £7/bottle, but it's one of those ones that is on sale every single time you walk past the supermarket wine aisle, so it might as well be £4.50 or whatever. Anyway, this is a little darker than I like my Cabs, but it's super-fierce and very punchy. It's like the Xena: Warrior Princess of el cheapo reds. Muy bien.

2. South Cab Sauvignon (£4.99)

Chilean. No-nonsense and bright. Okay, this spring I discovered this drink called tinto de verano in Spain, which means "the red wine of summer". It's red wine + (European) lemonade + ice, and it's just this really nice fizzy fruity refreshing drink. But! You can't make it with boring wine, you have to have something zingy and full. Which is what this is! South America is really good for zingy wines.

1. Frontera Cab Sauvignon (3 for £10)

Chilean. This is amaaaazing. It is probably my favorite wine ever at the moment – it's the perfect combination of all my favorite wine aspects (red fruit flavors, round, full, easy-drinking) and regularly costing less than £4/bottle. It is on sale at Sainsbury's for 3 for £10 about every other week, and I buy it every time and bring it to every single dinner party to which I am invited. . Also, it has a screw-top, which is very important if you are (for example) bringing it out to a park or outdoor concert or something. Or if you have reached the point in the evening where operating a bottle opener would not be such a safe idea. Which, with Frontera Cabernet Sauvignon, it is very easy to do.

Political yelling (or, I love Nancy Pelosi)

2009-07-08T09:26:00.000-07:00

I was just thinking today about how much I like Nancy Pelosi. The crazy people on Fox News and at Free Republic have dubbed her "the Mafia Queen", which I guess is supposed to be an insult, even though it actually sounds like a superhero name (or a TV show I would watch every week). She is probably one of the top three most-hated lady politicians in the US, with Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin.

Political yelling
Now, I am a big fan of politician-hating in general. I do politics like I do sports, which is a trait I inherited from my parents. There is Team Us, and there is Team Them, and you all yell a lot and then go into the voting booth and vote with your conscience. Or play "Here comes Carolina-lina" and jump over things on fire. Whatever.

The purpose of political yelling is to let the voter both blow off frustration with everything that's wrong with this damn country, and celebrate everything that's great about this damn country. Like, "Oh my god, can you believe what a smug asshole Mike Huckabee was on the Daily Show last night? I want to punch his stupid face! FUCK YOU, MIKE HUCKABEE!", that actually means "It is not reasonable to pretend that the way to fix the many issues surrounding unwanted pregnancies is to simply say 'Don't do it'. The arguments you are making are misogynist, and you are smearing your class, race and gender privilege all over the place."

On the other side, "Oh my god, can you believe how hot Gavin Newsom is? Look at that suit! GAVIN I LOVE YOU" actually means "Health care for everybody is important, and so is environmentalism, and gay rights."

Lady politicians
However, political yelling gets really problematic when the politician is a woman, and that is because sexism comes out roaring.

Sarah Palin is the obvious first example. Now, I dislike Sarah Palin for a lot of reasons, none of which have anything to do with her being a woman. And yet, the vast majority of insults that my lefty brethren sling at her are gendered. They may be trying to code "Comfort in ignorance is dangerous and should be corrected, not praised", but they are actually communicating "I hate women." Weird! And most of the attacks on Hillary Clinton are about her effect on men, whether by busting up the patriarchy ("ball-buster") or failing to conform to the beauty standard ("boner-shrinker").

Which is total bullshit. You know who doesn't get that so much? Nancy Pelosi. I don't know why! But I'm glad of it. Okay, she gets a few plastic-surgery cracks, but most of the political yellers are angry at her because they're anxious about her policies, and not because she's a woman at all!

Pelosi also wrote an awesome book for young women about how to kick ass and be a girl, called Know Your Power: A Message to America's Daughters (great title), and puts hilarious videos on YouTube.

So, way to be, Nancy Pelosi. Many people hate you for being a Marxist socialist mafiosa, but I think you're great.

An American Fourth of July in London

2009-07-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

The Fourth of July is great. Really great. It's a Great American Holiday (tm). It is a celebration of strongly-worded letters and moral imperative. It commemorates an allegory of democracy, when a brave band of thinkers created a truly republican government that represents the interests of all the people, and Stood Up For What They Believed In in the face of a big hefty global empire. It is about smashing through the steel ceiling of economic oppression and giving white guys everywhere the freedom to make their own futures. (That said, many of the white guys were, for the time, fairly excited about equal rights for everybody, including ladies and non-white people [except for the non-white people who were already there], but theoretically they were in favor of universal civil rights. Mostly.)

So that's good! But there's a problem with the allegory, and that is that it's the national myth and it needs a bad guy. To prove how free, equal and good the United States is, the myth has to set up another country as the antithetical Bad Guys, to represent tyranny, oppression, and general dickishness. In the American founding myth, that's the Brits. And that's awkward.

In 1776

That black-and-white allegorical underpinning of the holiday is why there is only one way to describe the tone of the citywide American barbecue I attended in Battersea Park: sheepish.

As I walked through the west gate, a couple was looking over their shoulders as they read the map, as if a south London mob were about to turn up and yell at them for generalizing about their ancestors.

Picnickers at tables were hunched over, elbows tucked in to protect their internal organs. Rather than spread out by the lake, attendees clustered under the trees, seeking shelter and protection from the changing, threatening sky.

We knew the Independence Myth about the Big Bad Briton wasn't true, and we knew they knew we knew.

That's the problem with making other people the supervillains in your mythology: you have to actually deal with them the next morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that, because of globalization, and how it turns out there really isn't such a thing as a nation of Bad People.*

If, however, we refit the national myth so it focuses on Bad Ideas (economic interests trumping humanist ones, disinterested or oppressive governments) versus Good Ideas (equality, voting, strongly-worded letters), not only do we stop vilifying perfectly nice other nations, but we are better equipped to stop ourselves when we are in danger of committing Bad Ideas.

For example!

Bad Idea: Lying signs

(there was in fact a nice big picnic, as I said)

Good Idea: Barbecue

Great Idea: These shoes

Those are my good-luck Patriot Shoes. I wore them on election night with a Michelle Obama-style Carolina blue sheath dress, and look what happened! Freedom happened, y'all.

Happy Good Idea Day.

*There can still be groups of ideologically-linked bad people, of course. Like Al-Qaeda, and Duke fans.

Inclusive patriotism in America

2009-07-03T09:58:00.000-07:00

Hello, the Fourth of July is tomorrow! I'm going to a picnic in Battersea Park. I'm looking forward to being conflicted (and also drunk). America is a cultural empire, and the whole point of the holiday is "Fuck you, giant English-speaking capitalist empire who controls most of the world's trade routes!", which is ironic and uncomfortable! On the other hand, it is also about "stodgy older-generation Europeans versus brash young vigorous New Worlders" which is kind of still applicable?

America, circa 1775

...Nah.

Anyway, for me it is a holiday about ideas more than anything else, and it's really excited that you get to marry the ideals of "personal liberty" and "governmental accountability" and "all people are created equal" with "drinking beer on the lawn" and "blowing harmless yet loud stuff up" and "bombastic marching-band music".

And edgy patriotic songs, which I love most of all.

America, the Beautiful

America, America, God mend thine every flaw;
Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law

The first verse, which everyone knows, is pretty and inoffensive, but in the later ones, man, this song gets down to it. This one is my favorite because it implies that America has flaws, a shitload of them. Like how it lacks self-control and doesn't have laws that confirm liberty for everybody. Which, oh, wait, it still doesn't! Oh my god! It is especially awesome because the lyrics were written by Katherine Lee Bates, a "literary spinster" living in a "Boston marriage" with her "lesbian girlfriend".

This Land is Your Land

In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple
By the welfare office, I saw my people
And some were stumbling, and some stood wondering
If this land was made for you and me

POOR PEOPLE ARE CITIZENS TOO?! I just, I love all imagery where the nation is acknowledged as a community of disparate origin, means and gender. And Woody Guthrie is so optimistic. He tells you about these problems, introduces this tension and that uncertainty, asks the question of whether it's going to change, and then rolls you into the affirmative chorus of "yes! This land is your land!" The inclusiveness of "my people" is just lovely.

The Ghost of Tom Joad

Tom said, Where there's somebody fighting for a place to stand
Or decent job or a helping hand
Wherever somebody's struggling to be free
Look in their eyes, Ma, you'll see me.

Less optimistic, and also more explicitly patriarchal, with Tom Joad as the breadwinning social justice champion and Bruce Springsteen hanging around the campfire listening to him. But. It's still hopeful, and it puts the onus on the individual to take action against social injustice, instead of describing how things should be and hoping they'll get there eventually.

Here, have a manifesto: Let America be America again, Langston Hughes.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Hughes is probably my favorite writer of all time, and this poem. I used to cry over it in university because I didn't think it was true, or possible. I do now, though. In January I went to Barack Obama's inauguration and it was just so fucking special, you guys. I remember sitting in a Tex-Mex bar around the corner from the Lincoln Memorial with one of my best friends, drinking El Cheapo margaritas and singing the above "This Land Is Your Land" with the other young people in the bar, and the million people out on the grass, and we were all crying and laughing and cautiously hopeful and impoverished and tipsy and that, folks, I think is what America is all about.

Summer recipes for £5 or less

2009-06-29T09:47:00.000-07:00

Okay, first let me get this out of the way: Sainsbury's 4-for-92p bitter is, if not heavenly, way drinkable for something that is 23p a can. Sainsbury's whole Basics (read: shit-cheap) range, in fact, is what I will call "surprisingly consumable".

Pan-fried salmon

Salmon: £2.50-3 for two steaks
Garlic: 75p for a few heads (you will have leftovers, score!)
Rice: 80p
(Assumed ingredients: butter, salt, black pepper)
Total: £4.05-4.55

Recommended prep music: New Sounds of Africa (Miriam Makeba)
Accompanying drink: blended margarita

I like my salmon like I like my men: simple, covered in garlic butter, and ready in under 15 minutes. (RIMSHOT.)

1. Start cooking rice so it will be ready when the salmon is done. I assume you know how to cook rice. I'm not very good at it so I won't give you any misdirected tips. I do like to put a little salt in, though.

2. Dump a whole bunch of black pepper on both sides of the salmon. I like to make it look like the inverse of a light pollution map of the eastern US seaboard. Sprinkle salt judiciously.

3. Peel four cloves of garlic.

4. Find a frying pan large enough for the salmon to lie flat. Clear a space on the stove. Turn stove on medium heat and drop a spoonful of butter in.

5. When butter has melted, drop garlic in. Push them around a bit until they are well and truly buttery. I like to life up the pan and shake it a little bit.

6. Gently put in salmon steak. Watch the sides. When they are cooked-pink-looking instead of uncooked-pink-looking about halfway through, flip them. I like to nudge the garlic cloves under the salmon like little woodland creatures seeking shelter under a tree trunk. It makes the flavor sharper.

(somewhere in here) When the rice is done, scoop it out and put it on a plate. I like to nudge it to one side to make room for the salmon.

7. When the salmon is cooked-pink-looking all the way through, use the flipper to put it on the plate and then (my favorite part!) drizzle all the buttery goo and garlic over it, and the rice.

8. Turn off the stove.

Black bean California salad

Black beans: 69p
Banana: 25p
Avocado: £1
Tomato: 50p
Fresh cilantro: £1
Total: £3.44

Recommended prep music: Little Deuce Coupe (The Beach Boys)
Accompanying drink: pina colada

This one is one of my favorites, because it's interesting and fresh, but also really easy.

1. Wash black beans and put them in a salad bowl

2. Shred cilantro and put it in the bowl

3. Dice everything else and put it in the bowl.

4. Find a spoon and gently mix it so it's fairly equally distributed.

See? Easy. And delicious. You can't go wrong with avocado. It's also vegetarian and vegan if you're into that kind of thing.

Beer bratwurst

Bratwurst: £3 for a six-pack
Beer: 92p (see above).
Rolls (if you're going to be fancy): 50p
(Assumed ingredients: olive oil)
Total: £4.42

Recommended prep music: The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle (Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band)
Accompanying drink: beer, duh

1. Put beer in fridge. Wait 20 minutes.

2. Take out a can and drink it.

3. Find a frying pan and a small pot (the smaller and deeper the better, as you will use less beer). Clear spaces on the stove and put them on.

4. Turn frying pan onto high heat and splash a little olive oil in.

5. Pop in the bratwurst and sear them (they should look brownish and smell awesome).

THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT STEP. Too often have I seen rookie would-be bratwurst brewers skip it, and the result is that all the tasty bratwurst juices leach out when they are boiled in the beer, and it's really sad. YOU HAVE TO SEAR THE JUICES IN OR YOUR BRATWURST WILL BE BORING.

6. Tilt the seared bratwurst into the pot and put it on high heat. Take out two more cans of beer. Pour one into the pot. Start drinking the other.

7. While you drink the beer, the brats will begin boiling. They will be ready in about 10-12 minutes, or when you are about halfway through the second beer. Set it on the counter.

8. If you have rolls you might as well go whole hog and toast them or something.

9. Use a fork to capture the bratwursts and drop them on a plate (in the rolls if you have them I guess).

10. Eat them and finish your beer.

The end! You may have noticed that all the music dates to within about fifteen years of each other, but that is because summer happens between 1955 and 1975, in music, in fashion, and in cars.

My Five Worst-Ever Recurring Hangovers (And How To Cure Them)

2009-06-25T09:16:00.000-07:00

1. RSC Histories Hangover

I had this one yesterday, for the first time in more than a year. Oh, I've missed it. The RSC Histories was this fucking amazing piece of theatre that first happened in 2000-1 and were revived 2006-8. One ensemble of about thirty actors put on all eight of Shakespeare's continuous history plays (covering Richard II, Henry IVs, Henry V, Henry VIs, and Richard III). YOU GUYS IT KICKED ASS. The Henry VI trilogy is my favorite Shakespeare, bar none – it is energetic and vicious and have great women and swords and, man, I love them so much I can't even say.

Yeah, BOOM! ohmygod it kicks ass

When I went to see them in Stratford three years ago, I accidentally falling in with some of the actors at the pub afterward, which is why that is such a brilliant town. We kept in touch and, when the production came to London, went out for rounds a few more times. Friends and actors accumulated, and for two weekends in March 2008 I spent at least 80% of each day in Chalk Farm, either at the theatre watching the shows or at the bar drinking and talking about them.

Primary poison
Gin and tonic (Dirty Duck)
Red wine (theatre bar)

Last experienced
I thought this one was lost forever when the Histories closed last spring, but no! Nick Asbury, one of the actors, wrote a book about the production, happily titled Exit, Pursued by a Badger. He gave a talk and signing at the National last week. Four of us ended up in a terrifying pub below one of the train bridges at Waterloo, talking about York and Lancaster and (I think) Sartre and then realising we were about to miss the last train and sprinting for the station.

Cure
Getting up at 7 am to queue for £5 day tickets to the next show.

2. Pub Music Session Hangover

The hardest to predict. Bank holidays are a pretty good bet, but I can never tell when I walk into an Irish pub with my fiddle if it's going to be a pleasant, relaxed one that finishes up around 11:30, or a mack truck of tunes and endless pints of Guinness that spits us out, gasping, onto the pavement sometime vaguely after dawn.

Not pictured: seventy more pints settling behind the bar

Primary poison
Draft Guinness

Last experienced
At my Saturday night regular on Kilburn High Road. It was the landlady's 50th birthday, and there was cake. The regulars were filling up the till with drinks for the musicians. It looked like it might fade down around midnight – until a pack of fiddlers from Cricklewood and an itinerant concertina player rolled in. Then it really took off. We finally unpeeled ourselves from the corner table and staggered home around 6 or 6:30, which in early June is a stupidly bright time of day.

Cure
Irn-Bru, which may be Scottish but has all the ingredients necessary to snap a body back up: caffeine, glucose, and quinine to ward off malaria. A full fry-up with as much grease as the pan will take. The trick is to swing by the shop and buy the supplies on your way home, so you don't have to leave the flat the next day.

3. Wealthy Possibly-Evil Friend Visiting Hangover

I have this friend who works for the US in Iraq. I'll call him 'Sebastian Flyte', and hope that will be sufficient to illustrate his personality. I don't know what Sebastian does in Iraq, or who he exactly he reports to, but he makes a lot of money.

Every time he comes to London for holiday, which is about three times a year, we make a date for cocktails. It's very exciting, because I'm moderately impoverished (journalism's dying, we're in a recession, student loans, etc etc). I dress up. Sebastian wears what he usually wears, which is a sharply-creased ensemble that I'm sure is carefully styled for the season, weather and hour of day. We drift around West London drinking things made from gin, champagne or both until neither of us can stand up, and then we wobble toward cabs.

Primary poison
French 75s

Last experienced
The day after Good Friday (is that Holy Saturday?). I woke up fully clothed with no memory of what happened after leaving the bar at 2 am and setting out for the taxi rank across the street. There was a black women's jacket that didn't belong to me on the laundry pile, and one of my wardrobe doors had been ripped off its hinges. (I think what happened was that I started to fall over, clutched at the door to stay upright, and took it with me. No idea about the jacket, however. It was too big for me so I gave it to a charity shop.)

Cure
Before 2pm: Lying very still and whimpering 'Oh, mother' every twenty minutes.
After 2pm: Soda water with a splash of orange juice, and saltine crackers.

4. Shabbat Hangover

"If you call the Sabbath a delight...you will find your joy in the Eternal" (Isaiah 58:13-14)

In the Reform tradition I have found that means two things:

(1) Tasty food
(2) Lots of wine

So you're at home, or at a friend's home, and it's Friday night, it's the end of the week, and it's Shabbat, which is all about feeling nice and consciously not doing work. You're blessing the challah and wine, and relaxing into the weekend, and suddenly you're three bottles down and everyone's laughing and arguing happily and it's almost midnight but there's another bottle around here somewhere, come on.

This might just about do it, if no guests drop by unexpectedly

Primary poison
Kiddush wine

Last experienced
Three weeks ago, a couple in the conversion class I'm taking at my shul invited me to theirs for Friday night dinner. I brought wine. They had wine. They had cooked a lovely dinner. We started talking, tentatively, about the class and some of our classmates, and about five seconds later it was 2:30 am, we were critiquing the personals in the Jerusalem Post, and I was laughing so hard I couldn't breathe.

Cure
Leftover challah, morning service (followed by more kiddush wine).

5. Freedom Hangover

I am an American, and the clock in my heart will always be synchronized with what's going on back home. I stayed up at home to watch Senator Barack Obama accept the Democratic Party's nomination to run for President, at 3am British time. I went to an all-night pub in Shoreditch to watch him win the election at about 4am. And every year I go to the Sports Café in Haymarket to cheer on the Carolina Tarheels in the NCAA college basketball championship.

Primary poison
Jack and Coke

Last experienced
Yeah, the 'Heels were the team to beat in this year's playoffs, but it is still nervewracking to watch those last games. Especially after 2008's humiliating semifinal game against Kansas (ROY WILLIAMS WHAT WERE YOU THINKING LETTING THE CLOCK RUN LIKE THAT). Every American I know in London converges on the Sports Café in March. This year, there was a strong showing from UNC's study-abroad program. When the clock ran out, I heard my first spontaneous eruption of "I'm a Tarheel born, and I'm a Tarheel bred, and when I die I'll be Tarheel dead" in more than three years. Okay, yeah, I cried. And drunk-dialled my parents from Piccadilly Circus, and sang with them some more. Tyler Hansbrough, you'll be missed.

Cure
Krispy Kreme donuts, victory.

GO TO HELL, DUKE!

Coffeeshops I Love in Northwest London

2009-06-22T09:08:00.000-07:00

Okay, not all of them are coffeeshops, but I use them as if they are. Me, book, pens or notepad, £2 or less. Go!

Café Also
1255 Finchley Road, NW11 0AD
Café latte: £1.85

Café Also is attached to a small independent bookstore, which is almost always a good sign. I have been in Joseph's many a time to pick up haggadah and feminist tracts, but I only stepped into the adjoining café for the first time on Sunday.

It's adorable, oh my god. There's about a dozen tables inside and two outside, and they are big solid thick wooden ones that don't jiggle at all. You can shore up at one of the corner tables with a big pile of textbooks and that baby won't even flinch. The windows are big, so you can see the sunlight and everyone doing their shopping. Specials are written in chalk and illustrated with doodles on a blackboard, and there's posters for old book signings and concerts framed on the walls.

At the adjacent tables

A twentysomething couple teaching their young son to subtract
Three women 50-60ish talking about their book club
A twentysomething gentleman with art-student hair, reading The Cellist of Sarajevo

Ambient music

A mix of Louie Bega (of Mambo No. 5 fame) and Frank Sinatra.

Most likely to host

Book launch for Danya Ruttenberg's next project

Camden Arts Centre
Arkwright Road, London NW3 6DG
Café latte: £1.80 (small), £2.20 (large)

Floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides, and free wireless. I know everyone is doing free wireless these days, but this is the sort of place that had it in 2002 or whenever all the cool kids started doing it. It's arty. I think one of the laptop people might have been designing a lighting scheme for one of the independent theatres Camden is packed with.

They're all so goddamned hip. I haven't been when it's raining, but when it's sunny, it's the closest you can get to actually being outside. And, as you can see, there's a garden with a few tables in case you have a phobia of roofs.

At the adjacent tables

Five or six scattered young artsy people with laptops
A pair of women in their thirties talking animatedly about their friends
A 60-70ish gentleman tackling a slice of cheesecake
Two families (or one really big one) laughing outside

Ambient Music

None but the chatter of writers and photographers discussing their project ideas

Most likely to host

And I quote, "Camden Arts Centre has commissioned London-based Brazilian artist Alexandre da Cunha to create a new sculptural installation for Gallery 3. His dynamic, large-scale sculptures improvise on the concept of the readymade by reusing everyday objects."

Ciao Ciao
334 Kilburn High Road
Café latte: £1.65

Okay, for starters: I love Kilburn High Road. Like, a lot. It's why I live here. I love all the corner shops and tiny ethnic restaurants, I love the ratio of pubs per capita (about .47), I love the people walking down it at any given moment, who will be musicians, builders, businesspeople who say they live in West Hampstead, university dropouts with dogs, midday drunks, anything. It always fills me with a great love for the borough, London and humanity.

I remember walking home from work up the high road when a black Honda slowed down and rolled down its window, revealing a thirtysomething businessman. "Does anyone know how to get to the North London Tavern?" he called. A boy my age, who'd been walking in the opposite direction, swivelled and started explaining, with gestures. I described the pub sign. We reached a consensus. The driver thanked us and pulled off.

The next week I was on a bus that passed the Black Lion pub, where a middle-aged man, bald, in a grey shirt and jeans, sat on a table. He was playing guitar and singing to a woman who looked like him, and I think must have been his sister. She had a glass of amber ale and was laughing. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth while he sang.

Since I've moved to Kilburn (last December), I have never been able to stay in a bad mood from the Tube station to my front door.

Ciao Ciao has two rows of outdoor seating so you can watch everyone walk by. It has gorgeous sandwiches and great full breakfasts for under £5, and waitstaff who speak English earnestly if not always accurately. You live in a city like London so you can go to a cafe like Ciao Ciao.

At the adjacent tables

Two couples on second or third dates
Four women taking advantage of the pizza-and-a-beer for £7 dinner deal

Ambient music

OH MY GOD the music in this place is SO WEIRD. They have what I think is Italian MTV playing on two flat video screens, which are positioned prominently above the door and on the opposite wall, but the music they play (also Italian pop?) is never synched up with what's on the TVs. At first I thought it was just a clutch of surreal videos, but the songs never start and end at the same time. If you take a friend, you can make a game out of it!

Most likely to host

First date for businesspeople who pretend to live in West Hampstead
Hangover clump at 11 am on Sunday morning when everyone who was out at Powers Bar the night before peels themselves out of bed.

Three Things I Think We Can All Take From the Tube Strike

2009-06-12T07:33:00.000-07:00

1. People are idiots

Yeah, I'm talking about you, you moron who emerged from the depths of the Wednesday 17.02 Overground at Shepherd's Bush wheeling out a full-size bike. What the fuck? You took a bike on a train during a Tube strike – a really crowded train! It left people on the platform! – from Kensington Olympia to Shepherd's Bush?

Let me just illustrate something with a little Google Maps.

Okay, you see point A? That's Kensington Olympia. That is where our train pulled in at 17.00. It took about a minute and a half for everyone to disembark, followed by another, we'll say, two minutes while you wrangled your giant monster bike into the depths of the train, which finally pulled out at 17.04, leaving dozens of people disgruntled on the platform and you happily petting your enormous mechanical horse.

Take a look at point B. That's Shepherd's Bush. I know, Westfield! It's very exciting. That is where it took a good three minutes for everyone to get off the train, because your SuperChrome XXX Mountain Death Cycle was wedged between the support bars. But, after clonking a Muslim woman on the headscarf, you managed to escape, set your bike upright, and leap astride it to sail off into the afternoon sun at 17.08. Happy ending.

Now, I would appreciate it if you would cast your eyes over these directions, also from Google Maps. I know it says driving, but the assumed speed is 15 mph, which is pretty darn average for a London cyclist.

How long does it take? Four minutes. Four minutes for you to get from A to B. On, I have to say, really nice roads. They're straight, green and pleasant. It was sunny outside. Question: are you perhaps a vampire who has trouble remaining in direct sunlight for more than thirty seconds at a time? Because that I can understand (although carrying a bike around is still a mystery). Otherwise, dude, you're kind of a douche.

2. Shut up, Bob Crow

Unions are supposed to be cool and sympathetic. I am a member of a union. Workers' rights are important. Have you never seen Newsies? Did you not watch the second season of The Wire? Dude!

You are breaking Tiny Christian Bale's tiny heart. Unions are the way sexy heroes in the labour rights story, not the raving megalomaniacs. It is a recession! Stop being a dick!

3. Walking feels great! We are no longer slaves to the Tube map! Freedom!

So I walked almost all the way home yesterday! I did chicken out and catch a bus from Westbourne Park to Kilburn Park, but that was mostly because I was lost. Mostly. West London is, admittedly, one of the more pleasant parts of town, with all those leafy green trees and big wide streets and upmarket gastropubs, but it was very nice.

I admit to an unhealthy reliance on the Tube system. My flat is 90 seconds from Kilburn station (20 seconds in a sprint), and I use the Jubilee line to get everywhere. My main supermarket is the giant Sainsbury's on Finchley Road, four minutes by Tube. It took me months to figure out that I could walk, say, the mile down the high road to Kilburn Park station and that was okay. I didn't have to take the Jubilee down to Baker Street and change for the Bakerloo line.

My mental map of London is totally skewed by what's on the Tube map, as, I suspect, is most people's. But during the strike, I walked from Hammersmith (H&C, District and Piccadilly) to Shepherd's Bush (Central) to Notting Hill Gate (Circle & District) and it blew my mind. I thought London geography stopped working if you didn't duck underground every half-mile, but, no, it turns out it is in fact one big contiguous city! Consider me whammied.

Also, it was sunny, and all the urban young people (and some of the old ones) were outside getting cheerfully drunk while they waited for the trains to reopen that evening. My favorite thing to do in any city.

All's Well That Ends Well: Patriarchy and the rape trial in Shakespeare

2009-06-10T10:44:00.000-07:00

I saw a brilliant production of All's Well That Ends Well at the National Theatre last week, which reminded me of how pissed off I am that our society tells our men to pressure women into sex and then returns to those women a repulsively low rape conviction rate.

For those unfamiliar with the play, BardWeb has a summary that hits the high points, and the full text is at MIT Shakespeare.

Endemic sexism is strong in the play, although Shakespeare doesn't necessarily condone it. It most affects the two young women protagonists.

Helena de Narbonnes: dream girl of the patriarchy
Everybody but Bertram the Douche spends the first half of the play talking about how great Helena is. She is pretty great, but not for the reasons everyone else says. Helena, who studied medicine with her father and is now the world's greatest physician, is smart and tells people so! She takes shit and turns it into diamonds! She never gives up and decides to cut her losses; she says, "Fine, you want to play it like that?", cures the mystery disease and has the king up and out for dancing the next day. She gives radiant speeches about self-determinism and not letting life push you around.

But rather than actually talk about her as a real woman who has real qualities, the other characters -- the good stepmother, the fairy godfather, the ailing king -- buff her pedestal with statements like the following:

I have those hopes of her good that her education promises; her dispositions she inherits, which makes fair gifts fairer. For where an unclean mind carries virtuous qualities, there commendations go with pity; they are virtues, and traitors too. In her they are the better for their simpleness, she derives her honesty and achieves her goodness.

Translation: "Helena's great and might even pass for upper-class! She is so much better than pretty much every other woman! Helena, man, she is so nice and good and good and honest and good."

The characters never describe any specific qualities that Helena actually possesses. (They call her honest, which she isn't. She's clever, but she lies all over the place. It is, in fact, pretty awesome, but nobody notices this.) They just blandly "good" her. The king even justifies his vagueness, arguing that "Good alone is good without a name." Describing women as individuals with real qualities detracts from their goodness.

But what is good? How did Helena get good? How does she stay good? What will it mean for her if she loses her goodness? No one knows, and no one cares. They're happy to throw "good" at her feet and, as part of their adulation, turn around and slam anyone who falls short of their mysterious, invisible standards.

Women in today's society are held to the same impossible vague judgment. Impossible because no one can be judged good that isn't a fictional paragon. There is no woman so bland, so vague, so lacking in the flaws that make up a personality to be called "good", because the invisible line that marks the path is the path, and it is impossible to stand completely within a line. One foot or the other must be over it, somewhere.

So happens when you step out? When you cross one of the invisible lines? What moves a woman from nebulously Good to nebulously Bad?

Diana Capilet: barefoot on a high-wire
The second young woman in All's Well shows us what can push a woman over: Anything! Everything! Having sex! Not having sex! Having the wrong kind of sex (which still may be any sex at all)! Being foreign! Being a civilian in an occupied country!

Diana, an Italian innkeeper's daughter, is pressed into the plot when Bertram (remember, a soldier in the army occupying Italy), puts his boots up on her table and starts sexually harassing her. I'm sure Shakespeare intended it to be creepy. But I suspect that he meant it because Bertram is a fickle doof, not because he is an occupying soldier harassing a woman in an invaded country: a woman disadvantaged by gender, race and class, who has to put up with his shit or lose her livelihood.

Shakespeare is sickeningly accurate, and writes for Bertram nearly every argument that dudes today are still using to coax, push, pester and coerce women into unwanted sex.

"You're beautiful; I want you."
"But I love sex, it feels great."
"It's only natural, it's what humans are supposed to do."
"Loosen up! You're not dead, live a little!"
"I love you more than I've ever loved anyone else -- even my wife."
"I'm not like those other guys. I'm nice. You can trust me. I respect you."
And, finally, the grand classic "Why are you being such a bitch about everything?" Because, guys, there's no way to win a lady's heart like using a gendered slur when she finally tells you to fuck off because you won't stop fucking harassing her.

If you can spot the common missing aspect of all these arguments, by the way, it's the woman's pleasure. This shouldn't need saying, but dudes, "Me me me I want I want I want!" is neither a valid argument nor acceptable behavior for anyone above the age of four.

The rape trial: when the patriarchy hauls back for a punch in the face
When everyone, including Diana, travels back to France to sort the plot out, there is a rape trial. It's not explicitly one, but in form, function, and forehead-bashing sexism from nearly every party involved, it is.

And when Diana stands in front of the court and says, Bertram, you harassed me for a week and promised you would marry me before I slept with you, Bertram's defense is, "well, you're a slut, and therefore you don't count as a person."

She's impudent, my lord,
And was a common gamester to the camp.

and

Certain it is I liked her,
And boarded her i' the wanton way of youth:
She knew her distance and did angle for me,
Madding my eagerness with her restraint.

She slept with everybody and liked it; she was asking for it; boys will be boys. Therefore, anything she has to say about herself, myself, her own agency or what actually happened doesn't count.

And nobody has a problem with this. Not the king, not the fairy godfather, not the good stepmother. The king, in fact, tries to imprison and execute her for lying. The fairy godfather uses more contemptuous, sexist slurs against her ("This woman's an easy glove, my lord; she goes off and on at pleasure") than he ever did against Bertram the Douche. The good stepmother just doesn't say anything.

Why is this infuriating? It's a play that's been around for four hundred years, you think, of course it's going to be sexist and fucked-up. No, it's infuriating -- and I am, literally, furious -- because these attitudes are still around today, and they continue to affect women.

This production at the National makes it clear just how wrong those attitudes are, a welcome necessity for a modern production. It also emphasizes Diana's disadvantaged position, a side effect of casting Hasina Haque, a British actor of Bengali origin. A blond Anglo soldier sexually harassing a civilian southwest Asian woman in her occupied nation: this image has even more uncomfortable contemporary reverberations than the broader problem of sexism in the criminal justice system, but both are still incredibly relevant.

Women whom someone has raped are still arrested and jailed for 'false report'. Rape conviction rates in the UK are still shockingly, unbelievably low -- 6.5%, with an estimated 95% never being reported at all.

Less than half of one percent -- .325% -- of all UK rapes ever result in conviction.

Fuck that. Seriously, fuck that. We can do better than that. We will do better than that.

I just hope changing the attitudes behind those numbers doesn't take another 400 years.

*When I read this play, I have to picture Bertram as some sort of unholy love blend of Taye Diggs, Daniel Day-Lewis and Naveen Andrews, because otherwise there is just no way to justify Helena's continuing to put up with his shit.

J-Date's sexist ads: Women with heads

2009-06-08T08:19:00.001-07:00

I left West Hampstead tube station early yesterday afternoon, aiming for the West End Lane Bookstore. (There's a folk tales display in the famous front window.) When I looked across the street, I saw a giant billboard carrying the most shockingly sexist ad I have seen in weeks.
A photograph can be seen at the bottom of the latest from Ten Year Leap.

It's a picture of a woman's body, cropped from her neck to her upper legs. Her shirt is tiny. Her breasts are enormous. She is holding out a pint of beer. "What's more," the caption says, "she's Jewish."

They are ads for the popular international Jewish dating site, J-Date, to which I will not link (Google it if you must). Marcus Dysch of the Jewish Chronicle wants to know, "Have J-Date Boobed?" (sic)

No, he concludes, it has not. He calls women who are boycotting the site "nimby" and asks,

Would these women prefer to have seen one of the old stereotypes that we all know so well and indeed find infinitely more offensive?

Ah, yes, the old offensive "women have heads" stereotype. Why, I can’t tell you how appalled I was at the ads for the following UK dating sites, most of which offer searches by religion:

(Guardian Soulmates)

(eHarmony.com)

(Match.com)

(Flirtbox)

In the eHarmony ad, the woman is even using using her mouth (part of her head!) to smile! It is if she were an active individual who is enjoying herself as a person, rather than a sexual object who has been stripped, posed and cropped into a thoughtless pair of tabula rasa boobs for men to project their sexy kosher fantasies all over! I cannot tell you how offensive I find you, eHarmony ad! Oh, wait, I can, it is not at all, and in fact I think it's pretty awesome when ads give agency and confidence to both men and women. Whoops. How regressive of me.

Seriously I have no idea what 'old stereotypes that we all know so well' these J-Date ads are supposed to be subverting. If the subversion is "tiny shirt, big boobs, no head/mouth, loves the blokey things that you, the man, love", the institution must be, what? Something like Rebecca West's feminism: women who express opinions that differ from those of a prostitute or a doormat. And have heads.

Women with heads
Let's see what sort of 'stereotypical' Jewish women that leaves us with. Wikipedia's list of Jewish feminists makes for hours of delighted reading, especially with so many men included (hooray for allies!), but they aren't all: there is also Miriam Moses, who was elected the first woman mayor of Stepney in 1931; Jen Taylor Friedman, the first woman known to complete a Torah scroll, and the creator of Tefillin Barbie; my own rabbi, Dr Laura Janner-Klausner; and dozens of other women I know personally, who not only have heads and mouths but have frequently managed to find romantic partners nonetheless.

What other notably offensive Jewish women have heads? Well, there's my blog's namesake, Judith, of course.

She's got two! Atta girl.