KITCHEN ADVENTURES: SPREAD THE LOVE. I had a ridiculously tasty lunch the other day.

Anyway, ingredients (use the amount that seems right to you): sourdough bread, garlic, fresh ginger, crimini mushrooms (button and shiitake would also work), cream cheese, olive oil, and a bottled sesame-ginger sauce I bought at the Whole Foods corporate-charity sale.

What I did: Finely chopped the garlic, peeled and finely chopped the ginger, and finely chopped the mushrooms. Heated olive oil in a pot. Put a big thick slab of sourdough in the toaster oven. When the oil was very hot, dumped in the garlic, ginger, and mushrooms.

When they were deliciously fragrant, I threw in a mess of cream cheese and some of the bottled sauce. This all got hit with the immersion blender until it was smooth and creamy with a few bits of mushroom still visible.

At this point the sourdough was nicely toasted, so I put it on a plate and topped it with the cream cheese mixture.

the taste: Incredible! Lush, with that ginger-mushroom medley I adore. I didn't need extra salt (although you might), given how many of the ingredients were premade, and I usually throw extra salt on everything. The only slight issue was that I found it very hard to judge how much cream cheese to use, so I ended up with at least 1 1/2 times the amount I really needed to thickly coat the toast. That's okay though--I really did not mind basically eating some of the spread with my fingers. It is that good.

STILLTASTY. Very useful website for letting you know how far past the sell-by date you can keep all manner of foodstuffs. Via YumSugar.

"Please be so gracious as to remember that the last days are here."
--Mr. Zakarka, in Sándor Márai, The Rebels, tr. George Szirtes

I WOULD NEVER SAY "I TOLD YOU SO," OH, BUT TONY... I TOLD YOU SO: Some aphorisms of Don Colacho, as I discover a blog. (...For the theological ones, I feel duty-bound to note that Christianity complicates everybody's aphoristic wisdom a.k.a. self-image, so if you want to argue with an aphorism it might be better to sit and let it steep in you and figure out the ways in which it might be true. Or to put it another way, I don't think "Don Colacho's" point is actually that he's right about Jesus.)

#2,966: Superficial, like the sociological explanation of any behavior.

#2,964: A noble society is one where obeying and exercising authority are ethical behaviors, and not mere practical necessities.

#2,956: The modern clergy believe they can bring man closer to Christ by insisting on Christ’s humanity.

Thus forgetting that we do not trust in Christ because He is man, but because He is God.

#2,953: Historical events stop being interesting the more accustomed their participants become to judging everything in purely secular categories.

Without the intervention of gods everything becomes boring.

#2,952: If we are ignorant of an epoch’s art, its history is a colorless narrative.

#2,949: Where the law is not customary law, it is easily turned into a mere political weapon.

#2,942: The secret longing of every civilized society is not to abolish inequality, but to educate it.

#2,938: Baroque, preciosity, modernism, are noble failings, but failings in the end.

#2,937: An individual is defined less by his contradictions than by the way he comes to terms with them.

#2,936: The modern clergy, in order to save the institution, try to rid themselves of the message.

#2,932: After having been, in the last century, the instrument of political radicalism, universal suffrage is becoming, as Tocqueville foresaw, a conservative mechanism.

#2,931: Religion is socially effective not when it adopts socio-political solutions, but when it succeeds in having society be spontaneously influenced by purely religious attitudes.

[I'm stopping after one page, but this is fantastic stuff. Even the punchlines with which I actively disagree are fierce.]

RIOT CABARET: Really enjoying Sublimity Now's guide to acts similar to Tom Waits. Skewing farther toward the cabaret genre, I think she should try Agnes Bernelle ("It Was Me," maybe?) and the sublime Marc Almond.

Especially liked "The Man on the Burning Tightrope"--

He could have been somebody
He could have been somebody else
It could have been so much worse.

--and this quick refrain from "Old-Fashioned Morphine"--

Sister, don't get worried,
Sister, don't get worried,
Sister, don't get worried,
Because the world is almost done.

The so highly acclaimed “dominion of man over nature” turned out to be merely an enormous capability to kill.
--Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 474

I can't believe I have evaded this author for so long. Huge thanks to Sublimity Now for the link.

>HOLY CATS THIS LOOKS GREAT. I was already kind of excited for this aliens-vs.-the-council-estates flick, but now I want all of it, right now.

THE FLYING MONK: Daniel Mitsui is running a series on "Early Catholic Aviators"--like, really early.

The first known serious flight attempt in world history occurred about a thousand years before the Wright brothers, in western England. Then, a young Benedictine monk leapt with a crude pair of cloth wings from a watchtower of a church abbey at the beginning of the 11th century. This monk, known to history as Eilmer of Malmesbury, covered a furlong - a distance of approximately 600 feet - before landing heavily and breaking both legs. Afterwards, he remarked that the cause of his crash was that he had forgotten to provide himself with a tail.

the rest of that entry!

and another!

This, rather, is the fasting that I wish:
releasing those bound unjustly,
untying the thongs of the yoke;
Setting free the oppressed,
breaking every yoke;
Sharing your bread with the hungry,
sheltering the oppressed and the homeless;
Clothing the naked when you see them,
and not turning your back on your own.
--Isaiah 6-7

TRUST FALLS: My Inside Catholic column, on trust, mistrust, and conversion. I'm honestly not really satisfied with this one, but you all might find something interesting or useful in it--and there is fire, so hey. Please ignore the headline, which is a sardonic hangover from a completely different earlier draft.

While Noboru wandered through private dreams Tsukazaki stood at Fusako's side, and the heat of his body in the sultry chart room was beginning to oppress her: when the parasol she had leaned against a desk clattered suddenly to the floor, she felt as if she herself, fainting, had fallen.
--Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, tr. John Nathan

I SWAN TO MAN: Some thoughts on the Matthew Bourne Swan Lake, as viewed via Netflix.

First, I loved this. It had a lot of images I want to stow away in my mental Mombi gallery of heads. The look of this production is iconic for a reason! The opening dream sequence replaces the "bright boy called Death" with a mature swan/man, in a little boy's dreams--a really stunning, disturbing, enthralling image. Adulthood, aggression, masculinity, otherworldliness and the sublime are all offered as possible candidates for "the monster at the end of this book," all shifting and iridescently fluid, identified with one another and yet distinguishable.

The intense longing conveyed in the park/lake scenes was especially fine and poignant, and I loved the eye-patched woman in the final "society" scene. I've never seen a traditional Swan Lake, so I don't know to what extent matching the most iconic music to moments in which the lovers are parted or are yearning for one another is typical, but it was really amazing. The plangent, familiar music becomes eldritch when it expresses nightmare rather than dream, liminality rather than immersion.

I was strongly reminded of both the strengths and the weaknesses of Derek Jarman's Edward II. The "looks" of the two productions are similar. The faint hint of misogyny is common to both--though much more prominent in the Bourne show because he has so few roles for women. Both Jarman and Bourne don't present a madonna/whore dichotomy... more of a dictatrix/flapper dichotomy. (Did Margaret Thatcher really do so much psychological damage?) The roles for women in Bourne's Swan Lake are as follows: 1) Maria Motherissueskaya, 2) Ditzie Doritos, 3) Butterfly Ballerinas whose art is cheap and obvious (unlike the subtle work we're watching now!) and 4) Eyepatch of Awesome.

And the sense of thwarted erotic hunger is of course preeminent in both productions. Jarman's work is much better because he chooses to express anger rather than self-pity, and politics rather than pop-psychology. Nonetheless if you are glad you saw his EII you should probably see this show too.

Speaking of pop-psychology, this production was really swilling the cliché. The swans are coming from beneath the bed! He looks at his reflection and drinks from a flask to demonstrate his pain! I'm really conflicted about this, since a) ballet, like opera (like horror, like genre in general), is already stylized and so cliche is always imminent, and
b) I'm pretty sure I fell in love with figure skating in large part because it married actual artistry so completely with vaudeville tawdriness, sawdust and stardust. (Oh, why not, here's more Christopher Bowman.)

So if we're simply mining pop-psych for immediately compelling, intelligible hieroglyphics of melodrama, then I support that 106%. (Not just 100%, because I am beyond reason.) But the Bourne production seemed to me to swing occasionally into self-seriousness, an attempt at actually representing the inner consciousness of a conflicted gay prince, and this I found a bit Oprah-ish or insistent.

And so we return to our sheep (or our feathers)--there are so many sequences of this production which I found amazing. I loved the drunken staggering outside the bar. I loved the pursuing-retreating-captured dynamic after the ball.

But let me end by comparing this disc, unfairly, to two live performances.

First: I don't think I could have really understood this production before I became a fan of the Synetic Theater. Their provocative, intermittently tawdry, undeniably brilliant and idiosyncratic interpretations of classic works through dance helped me develop a modern-dance vocabulary. They were able to show me, as if teaching me sign language, how there is no one-to-one correspondence between dance and Shakespeare and yet a dance troupe can convey all the complexities and ornaments of Antony and Cleopatra. (This month their King Lear opens and I am LITERALLY JOE BIDEN bursting at the seams to see it!) Gestures aren't words, and yet a dance sequence can be a paragraph.

And second... a few days after I saw the Bourne Swan Lake via Netflix, I saw the Mariinsky Ballet (if you remember Reagan then you, like me, may know them best by their Soviet-era name, the Kirov Ballet) perform "Giselle."

Look, I know it's not fair to compare the Mariinsky to anyone. And yet the shocking precision of their movements--despite a radically silly storyline, despite sequences in which the ballerinas had to hop across the stage--the grace and the illusion of effortless gliding were simply unparalleled. They took us into another dimension, another kind of consciousness (I KNOW how foo-foo I sound! I can't think of any other way to put it!), simply through their razor-sharp control. Their technical prowess made them so alien that they didn't have to rely on their interpretation of the story for sublimity.

HOLY CATS! (Sorry.)

I haven't watched the linked YouTube video, since I'm pretty sure it would freak me out even at age 32.

APPARAT CHIC Can this be real? Via PES.

"Yes, I'm cured," she said sadly. "I shall never be green again. It was lovely while it lasted."

"It's nice grown-up, too," Grant said comfortingly, and went away down the stairs.
--Josephine Tey, To Love and Be Wise

ONE MAN SAYS NO TO HARSH INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES.

Matthew Alexander led the interrogation team that tracked down al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006.

Alexander, a critic of the harsh techniques employed by the military during the administration of George W. Bush, says he used strategic, noncoercive methods of interrogation to find al-Zarqawi, which he wrote about in his book How to Break a Terrorist.

In his second book, Kill or Capture, Alexander — a pseudonym for the author — recounts how his team of interrogators tracked down and captured another wanted man: a Syrian named Zafar, the leader of al-Qaida in northern Iraq.

But finding Zafar was not easy. Alexander says he conducted hundreds of interrogations and supervised more than a thousand more while trying to track down a man who eluded security forces and had never once been photographed by U.S. forces.

In a conversation with Dave Davies on NPR's Fresh Air, Alexander details the interrogation tactics he used while conducting his kill-or-capture missions in the area of Iraq where Zafar was thought to be hiding. ...

To gain trust with the Sunni combatants he was interviewing, Alexander says, he would admit that the United States had made some strategic mistakes in its approach in Iraq.

"Almost every detainee that I admitted those mistakes to, they all were surprised that I was willing to admit that," he says. "And it moved many of them to hear that, because many of them had lost family members or friends because of these actions — because of allowing the Shia militias to run free. And so when they heard that apology followed by an offer to work together, it was very appealing."

More than anything, Alexander says, it was important for interrogators to understand the detainee and know exactly where they were coming from. Interrogators who believed in misguided stereotypes about Muslims and Arabs, he says, were the single most detrimental factor to undermining interrogations in Iraq. ...

On how he would start an interrogation

"Sometimes I would walk in with my copy of the Quran, and I would recite a line. Usually I would use the first line of the Quran, which is 'Praise be to Allah, the most compassionate, the most merciful,' which would help me with compassion toward my enemy who's sitting in front of me but then also put in place an obligation of reciprocity on their part to show compassion toward me, by providing information."

more

HOW TO MAKE A LASER OUT OF GIN AND TONIC. Via DLB. This is the only use of gin I approve.

POP-UP PULP: BOOK COVERS MADE INTO DRAMATIC 3D SCENES. Via Unequally Yoked.

As against a friend no shield is worn nor sword drawn in defense.
--a 1916 Iowa court opinion, quoted in Friend v. Friend

THE COLD WAR, FORGIVENESS, AND CHAMPAGNE BECAUSE OF AWESOME.