Butternut Squash Winter Salad

I'm heading out of town for the holidays, which is a great excuse to clean out my fridge. I won't describe the horrors I encountered therein, but they were many and disgusting. On the upside, I realized that I had all the ingredients for this delicious salad, which my mom introduced me to last winter. 

Perfect Butternut Squash and Arugula Salad

(with pomegranate seeds and feta!)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. 

Line a rimmed baking sheet with foil and drizzle with olive oil. 

Peel and slice one butternut squash into uniform chunks. I like to peel the squash while it's whole with a sharp knife, but that might be because my vegetable peeler is wimpy.  Toss the chunks in the olive oil on the baking sheet.

In a small bowl, mix a few glugs of maple syrup (about 2 Tb) with a few shakes of cumin. Brush mixture over the butternut squash pieces and place baking sheet in oven.

After 10 minutes, take out the squash, flip the pieces, and brush them again. Bake for another 10 minutes, or until soft and starting to caramelize.

While squash cooks, wash arugula (I always skip this because I am lazy/Trader Joe's arugula seems pretty clean) and arrange on a serving platter. Crumble as much feta cheese as you want over the arugula. Sprinkle with pomegranate seeds or dried cranberries.*

When squash is cooked, arrange the pieces over the arugula. 

Drizzle with your dressing of choice and dig in! (I ALWAYS use Cardini's because

 it is the only dressing that matters, but there are several recipes floating around the internet for homemade vinaigrettes and such!)

*note: I have always used cranberries in this recipe, but I happened to buy a cheap pomegranate and thought I'd try it. It was delicious! I was excited to try a trick I read in an Ottolenghi cookbook: apparently if you whack the back of the pomegranate with a wooden spoon, the seeds will fall right out! Spoiler alert: this did not work. Maybe I wasn't whacking hard enough. I picked them out with my fingers, pretending to be Persephone the whole time, of course.

I don't even want to admit how much I eat this salad. I struggle through non-winter-squash months. If it wasn't for summer tomatoes, I don't know what I'd do!

Culinary Judaism

In college I trained myself to stay awake until midnight, at least, but I'm usually in bed soon after, and I have a blessed ability to fall asleep quickly and easily. I never realized what a gift this was until I met my husband, who routinely stays up until 3 or 4 in the morning and then can't sleep once he forces himself to get in bed. Sometimes, during those creepy dark hours when he's the only one awake, kept company only by our Tom Servo and Crow robots, he gets weird cravings.

Yesterday at the grocery store, he confessed that the night before, he had been tormented by visions of matzoh ball soup. That was all I needed to hear to go into full-blown culinary jew mode.

I'm technically Jewish on my mother's side, but I'm about as secular as you can get. I identify strongly with my heritage on a cultural level, but I've only been inside a synagogue to attend a funeral, and when my family connects with our practicing relatives to celebrate Passover Seder, I usually embarrassingly mispronounce something like charoses. I didn't even remember to light Hanukah candles this year! 

The food, though? I've got that covered. (Not gefilte fish. Are you crazy?) When it comes to the basics, I lean pretty heavily on Smitten Kitchen and her delicious latke recipe. I double it because 12? That's not enough. I also use her matzoh ball recipe for the balls themselves, which are always deliciously fluffy (I double those, too). But I've never pulled it together to make my own chicken stock - I'm still embarrassingly squeamish around raw chicken carcasses. I'll get over it someday! 

This time, I hopped over to another recipe - Orangette's simple chicken soup. I made this recipe as written a few weeks ago (I even found a chayote, which I'd never heard of, in our southern Maine Hannaford's!) and it was really, really good. I liked the unfinicky simplicity of throwing the chicken pieces right into the pot and cooking them with the soup, so I borrowed that technique here.

Julia's Assemblage Matzoh ball soup:

Follow instructions to make Smitten Kitchen's matzoh ball batter. Refrigerate for half an hour while getting the stock on the stove. Put a separate pot of water on to boil to cook the balls.

Put skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs in a soup pot (I used 4 thighs). Cover with chicken stock, making sure chicken is covered by several inches (think about how much soup you want in the end, and remember that the volume of chicken will be reduced when you remove the bones). I use Better than Bouillon.

While stock is heating, peel and slice 2-3 carrots and 2 stalks of celery. 

Bring stock to a boil, then reduce to simmer. Add carrots and celery. Simmer for 40 minutes, skimming off scum and foam that come to the surface.

Once the soup is simmering, pull out the refrigerated matzoh batter. Form balls as directed by Smitten Kitchen and drop into the bubbling pot (gently!). They should be done cooking at the same time as your soup.

After 40 minutes, pull out chicken. Shred meat, discarding the gross bones and skin. Add meat back to pot. At this point, if you like noodles in your matzoh ball soup, add them! (wide egg noodles are best!)

Cook until noodles are done, about 8-10 minutes. 
Your matzoh balls should be done now, too.

Ladle in matzoh balls. DEVOUR.

Forgive the cell phone picture - we were too hungry to be elegant!

I made my latkes first, because they're easy to keep warm in the oven. Eaten with sour cream and applesauce in front of the Democratic Debate - heaven! And this morning I had a few more, topped with Molly Wizenberg's seven-minute egg. It doesn't get better than that.

Drop Stitch Cowl

I've decided that since my blog is super-secret and no one knows it exists, no harm will be done by posting some of the holiday projects I'm excited about! 

On our honeymoon this summer, my husband and I went to Wales. In the spirit of transparency, one of the main draws for me was the promise of sheep, wool, and spinning. And sheep we saw!

We also saw a lot of spinning, although it was mainly of the mechanized variety - Wales is speckled with historical textile factories. I left Will in the car more than once to dive into a world of depressing history! (the textile industry was routinely not great to women.) I would love to do a longer post later on the factories I saw. 

Yarn, though, was surprisingly scarce, and the few shops I found were stocked with lots of novelty and acrylic yarns in baby colors. I have nothing against synthetic yarn, but I was hoping that the absurd density of sheep would translate into more delicious stuff! Luckily, we spent a few nights in the town of Dolgellau. The town center is a warren of old stone buildings and cobblestone streets. It's the most fairytale, semi-bizarre place I've ever been. Every building is a little old factory! 

Tucked along one of those narrow, twisty streets was a little yarn shop called Knit One. And hidden in that yarn shop was the yarn I was looking for! Welsh-made, 100% wool, soft… and the most WACKY shades of neon I had ever seen. I bought two skeins. 

So I've had this awesome art yarn in my stash since June, and I've been afraid to touch it! It was TOO BEAUTIFUL, too full of feelings, and also I don't have much experience with bulky yarn. But then I realized I wanted to make something special for my mom this Christmas! She elevated mom-hood to an art form this year - she was my wedding planner extraordinaire, and on top of that reached new heights in her own textile art (she's a fabric dyer and art quilter, though those words hardly articulate what she creates). 

I started and frogged many, many different patterns. I knew I had to do a cowl based on my yardage, but I had trouble finding a pattern that would show off the yarn to its best advantage. The lucky combination was size 15 needles and this drop stitch cowl pattern. It was easy, fast (REALLY fast after months of nothing but sock knitting!) and I love how it turned out! The long dropped stitches were ideal for showing off the variegated weight of the yarn.  It's squishy and neon and I don't want to give it away! But I will, because I love my mom!

It is a REALLY weird feeling jumping from size 1 needles to size 15. It's like having stupid toddler hands.

Holiday

I've been incredibly industrious and crafty lately, but unfortunately all the yarn fruits of my labor must remain hidden for the time being, as they're gifts for people I love. Even though no one knows this blog actually exists, it still seems like tempting fate to toss up pictures!

I will say that everyone should go to Ravelry and drop $5 on this Feminist Killjoy hat. It's amazing. I can't wait to see it on the recipient's head, and I'm already planning to make another for myself. (I would recommend adding some repeats at the brim and the crown - the prototype I made was pretty shallow.)

I made cassoulet last night. It's one of my all-time favorite dishes (probably because it's replete with duck, for which I have an all-consuming passion) but I had long considered it way too complex for home-cooking. This recipe, which I found through David Lebovitz, convinced me otherwise. I couldn't even track down duck fat (and this in a city with a RESTAURANT called Duckfat!) and it was still the MOST delicious thing that has ever come out of my kitchen. I'm heating leftovers for breakfast as we speak. I have a lot of leftovers because my husband refuses to eat beans. MORE FOR ME.

TRANSITION

Have you all seen Holiday? The third-best-well-known Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant team-up is less aggressively brilliant than their most famous outing, The Philadelphia Story, and less bonkers than the almost exhausting Bringing up Baby.  It's absolutely wonderful.

First of all, this poster is quite misleading! Million dollars aside… one of the most fun things about this movie is that, against type, Cary Grant is playing something close to what he actually was - a working-class guy. (A working class guy who can do back-handsprings, which former acrobat Grant actually did!) He's worked his way up with a flair for business, and is on the verge of making that promised million, but Johnny Case is not the cultured man-about-town that we're so used to seeing Grant excel at. When we meet him, he's arriving at his fiancé's house for the first time. He assumes that she's a maid in the giant mansion, and is both delighted and weirded out when he realizes that she's a daughter of a household with a full staff and an elevator. 

It's a very small story, really - a couple gets engaged and then finds out if they actually like each other. But there are so many layers, mainly expressed through the diverse characters. Besides Grant, you've got Edward Everett Horton as his best friend, a middle-class professor (it's quite fun to see Horton in a non-bumbling role!). Lew Ayres is completely heartbreaking as the baby brother of the millionaire family, who stumbles about in a drunken stupor to avoid his reality as a disappointment to his authoritarian father. And then, of course, there's Katharine Hepburn as the black sheep of the family. 

It's funny to look back on, given that Hepburn is the Meryl Streep of Hollywood's golden age, but in 1938 she was still famously considered "box office poison." The label would not be rescinded until 1940's The Philadelphia Story, where she sent up her icy, snobbish persona to great effect. Hepburn had, of course, an undeniable personality that stamped itself on every role she played. Her authoritative bearing, her exaggerated transatlantic accent, her high cheekbones - she was arrogant! Many people found it hard to swallow. In retrospect, she is a force of nature. 

She struggled to escape the inescapable. In 1937's Stage Door, she played a rich girl who wants to act and assumes it's easy. It's an unlikeable role, not helped by the fact that in the end she achieves her goal through the death of the movie's sweetest character! In 1938, the same year as Holiday, she played against type in Bringing Up Baby, which is now seen as a perfect example of screwball comedy. It was a huge critical and commercial failure at the time. Personally, it's not one of my favorites - Hepburn is brilliant, but I find her chattering character exhausting! 

So she had tried two extremes - playing her persona to the hilt, and tossing it aside completely. In Holiday she did something subtler. Her character is to the manor born, but dissatisfied with her privilege. She's a prisoner in a golden cage. It could come off as "poor little rich girl" but instead it works - maybe because Hepburn felt herself to be in a similar trap.

In 1938, America was still feeling the effects of the Great Depression, which wouldn't entirely fade until war production ramped up a few years later. It was perhaps a daring choice to make a movie about unhappy rich people. Not that there weren't movies about the rich - the depression years were filled with escapist fantasies (several of the Fred and Ginger movies come to mind). Stranger, though, was a movie that posited that a poor man was in fact happier and better than a rich one, and that money would not buy happiness. Audiences without enough to eat, who would presumably identify with Cary Grant and his friends, were asked also to feel sympathy for Lew Ayres and Katharine Hepburn, who had an elevator in their home but no love, no joy. It's a nice grey scale of characterization that gives depth to what could be a lightweight comedy (though we still get the cartoonishly avaricious rich in the persons of Grant's fiancé and her father).

To a modern viewer, it works. But although the film was critically lauded, it didn't make money - contemporaries still didn't like Hepburn. Her next professional move was to leave RKO and Hollywood to star in Broadway in the play The Philadelphia Story, written especially for her. She didn't make another movie until she starred in the movie adaptation of that play, two years later. The rest is history.

A few notes: 

Lew Ayres, most well-known from All Quiet on the Western Front, is completely heartbreaking in this film as the depressed, drunken brother who doesn't have the willpower to escape his misery. When World War II broke out a few years after Holiday, Ayres registered as a conscientious objector - his work on All Quiet had exposed him to the horrors of war. He served as a medic in the Pacific theater, but public opinion was vicious. His career was irreparably damaged. 

Fun fact to offset this horrible story: He was briefly married to Ginger Rogers!

Holiday was directed by George Cukor, a giant of classic Hollywood, who was one of Katharine Hepburn's champions. By 1938, Cukor had already directed her in Little Women and Sylvia Scarlett (the latter with Cary Grant). He would go on to helm many of her collaborations with Spencer Tracy, as well as that little tour de force, The Philadelphia Story. Cukor was famous for being great with actors, particularly women. He should get a lot of credit for continuing to champion Hepburn when most of Hollywood had turned away. He deserves his own article!

I feel like I've mentioned The Philadelphia Story more than Holiday in this essay! It's hard to get away from it when writing about Katharine Hepburn, and especially her collaborations with Cary Grant. Its importance in film history aside, it's a perfect movie that I'll write about one day when I'm feeling brave. 

A last note: Cary Grant's Johnny Case seals a business deal over the course of the movie that nets him a tidy sum. He decides to retire on the profits, because he'd rather enjoy life as a young man and go back to work when he's old. He is 30. I will just say that his decision reads very differently to me, also 30, than it did when I first saw this movie a decade ago. Also, this sort of undercuts the movie's thesis that money can't buy happiness. Guess what - it does!! It's WORKING that stinks, duh.

Despite this movie being called Holiday (and my writing about it in December) it's not a Christmas movie (although it does take place over the New Year). The holiday of the title refers to Johnny's dream of a life on holiday. Nevertheless, it's wonderful holiday viewing! It's heartwarming, funny, and you get to see Cary Grant do acrobatics (and, at one point, a routine where Hepburn somersaults off his shoulders from standing height. It's very impressive!). What more do you need?

Still Alive!

Why hello!

I seem to have lost a month in there, didn't I? That's what happens, I suppose, when you plan a big move without realizing that a married couple of - I will admit it- adult age just may have a lot more stuff than a single post-college itinerant wanderer. When I moved to California at 22 I packed all my belongings into my beloved Honda Accord and drove myself cross country. Three years later, I had accumulated enough furniture to warrant a small storage cube, the kind that the moving company drops off and hauls for you. 

This time? My husband and I were wedged into a tiny one-bedroom that we had long ago outgrown - our wedding gifts were still piled in my grandmother's spare room, our extra storage space was overflowing, and we could barely walk. It was time to upsize. 

I won't go into detail, but in the end our move required two U-Haul trucks, both my parents (one to load, one to unload) three professional movers, and many, many days. In the end, though, we found ourselves in paradise: a new home (a HOUSE!) just a block from a wonderfully cold, rocky beach, with an office for him and a studio for me, a big kitchen, and the salty smell in the air that I've been missing for far too long. It's nice to be a New Englander again.

ASAP I'll be posting a catch-up on all the crafting I've managed to squeeze in, which is actually a lot; procrastinating from packing is a remarkably efficient way to finish many pairs of socks! I've also watched many quality movies while sorting through approximately 8,000 boxes of who-knows-what.

Let the new chapter commence!

Have I Been Busy!

Oh, boy! Changes, they are a'coming. There are a lot of exciting things on the horizon for my little yarn studio this month - a big location change and a huge increase in space, which will hopefully give me some more time to focus and figure out just what it is that's been tickling me so much about fiber for the past few years. 

In the meantime, my yarn stash is packed up and even my spinning wheels have gone into hibernation! I couldn't put it all away, though, so I figured keeping a set of dpns and a skein of sock yarn out couldn't hurt me… right? 

HA.

It's amazing how there's a yarn store in every town. A yarn store with the perfect skein of sock yarn that's been waiting for you, obviously, like a rescue puppy that just needs you to take it home. Ok, I made myself sad there. I don't know why every X-Files marathon on Chiller needs to have multiple animal-abuse ads thrown in there. What demographic are they aiming at? It's breaking my heart!

I got sidetracked. Sorry.

When last we spoke, I had just started yet another sock, with yarn I found at a yarn shop in Frederick, MD. It was with the best intentions - the yarn was the perfect color for my ailing aunt, and I thought it would match up well with a pattern I'd been eyeing for a while.

The yarn is French Market Fibers Warehouse Sock yarn, in colorway "Muses"

The yarn was nice to work with - very soft and drapey, and I like the way the colors marbled rather than striping. The socks flew together, thanks to the easy pattern (with lots of lovely stockinette, something I haven't done much thanks to my propensity for choosing absurdly complex patterns) and many, many plane trips. 

Socks are perfect for airplanes. They're small, repetitive, easy to pick up and put down at a moment's notice, and identifiable (if you have people constantly peering at you). This past month I flew to Portland, ME, Los Angeles, and back to DC. And every single flight had a connection. Hell. But very productive for my sock empire.

As I was making these socks for my aunt, I tried to size them a little smaller than usual. I may have gone too small - we'll find out tomorrow when I give them to her. I'd never done an anatomical toe before, but I really like the look and feel of it. I did have one toe start to unravel oddly - as in, not from the end - when I tried them on. Maybe I fouled up the kitchener? I did some lumpy grafting and it seems to have sorted itself.

I did find myself with a few… not complaints, but quibbles as I finished the socks and tried them on. It seems I've reached a comfort level with sock-knitting where I now have opinions about what I like and don't like. I thought the cuff on these was a bit short. I also didn't like the straight stockinette heel flap - every other sock I've made does the thing where you slip every other stitch on the knit rows, and I like the thicker, elastic heel that gives you. But the pattern was fantastic - easy to knit, and I love the look of the finished product. 

So what to do? I decided I had to repeat the pattern immediately, subbing in my preferences! My first shot at altering a sock pattern. And wouldn't you know, I had just found the PERFECT skein of yarn at an awesome shop in Portland. So away we went.

Yarn is Frolicking Feet (a Maine company!) handpainted in colorway "Seafoam"

First of all, I LOVE this yarn. The pictures don't do its color justice at all - I'll have to try to get some in better light. It's a lovely slate blue, with shots of greenish ocean color - particularly suited to this pattern's wavy structure. It's a little thicker than most of the other yarn I've used, and feels stronger.

I really feel like everything came together with these socks - it's the first time I've put on a finished sock and thought, "Yeah, I could wear this all day!" 

I did an extra half repeat on the cuff to lengthen it, and knit my preferred heel. The sock feels snugger and more structured (which is also probably because of the yarn, which is much stiffer than the purple). I think I've gotten the hang of picking up the heel flap stitches, after many, many messy attempts. No gaping holes!

In conclusion: I've gone sock-mad. But I think I've found a keeper pattern, and a great new yarn - an appropriate one, too, because in less than a month I, too, will be a Maine local!

On Incorrigibility

I'm great at beginnings. I have at least a dozen screenplays started on my computer, half-finished knitting projects tucked into dedicated bins, and sketched-out paintings stacked behind my filing cabinet and under my bed. This tendency, to start something full of promise and fail to follow through, reveals itself in more harmful ways too: at 30 I've never settled into a career, skipping instead from city to city, from job to unfulfilling job. I want to be a painter, a cheesemaker, a small-business owner - and I can't follow through on any of it.

Sometimes, this gets me down - I feel like I've failed at being an adult human, or that this flightiness is the outward manifestation of some deep, fundamental flaw. On the other hand, I like being a dreamer - I almost always feel like there's something big and special out there waiting for me, and I just haven't found it yet. But maybe just around that corner --

I've started yet another pair of socks. The yarn just leapt out at me, a purple glow in a wonderful shop in historic Frederick, MD. I was in town for my aunt's wedding, but the yarn reminded me of my other aunt, who has had a tough year health-wise and is preparing for major surgery. Her favorite color is purple.
I tried to make vanilla socks -- I tried. I started a perfectly nice ribbed pattern and realized, not even through the first cuff, that I was going to be bored. So I frogged it and went back to a pattern I've been poking at for a few months, a little scared. It requires reading a chart and the toe is anatomical, which I've never seen before. And I was just getting the hang of the kitchener stitch!

The pattern is called Kalajoki. It's a plain stockinette sock with a meandering, wavy ribbed river that rolls all the way from the cuff to the toe. The chart isn't complex - as usual, the hardest thing is keeping track of which line I'm on! The flowing line appealed to me for my aunt - undulating and unbroken, maybe it will convey some relaxing quality to her as she convalesces.

When I reach the end of this sock, I'll start on its mate - or maybe I'll see something shiny, find another skein of yarn, decide I'm done knitting and take up throwing pots. Until then - the wave continues.

Comfort Movies - October Sky

Do you have movies that are security blankets, warm bowls of soup, familiar old friends? I do. When I went to college, I brought a binder with about 20 favorite movies, and popped one into my laptop whenever I was feeling nervous or lonely. When I moved to Portland, OR and didn't know anyone, I spent many evenings watching old classics on the couch. 

One of my favorite comfort movies, for whatever reason, is the slight, but excellent, October Sky. The Jake Gyllenhaal-Chris Cooper period drama about the clash between father and son, coal country and the space age, never seems to pop up on anyone's list of… anything, really. Maybe it suffers when compared to Chris Cooper's other repressed-father-of-a-heavily-eyebrowed-son performance of 1999, in the Oscar-winning American Beauty. 

I first saw October Sky during its theatrical run. Washington, D.C. used to have a fantastic eat-in movie theater, where you sat on sofas and enjoyed cheeseburgers during the movie (I've been to the modern equivalent, Ipic, but it just doesn't have the same magic). I was in D.C. visiting family, and we all went to the theater together. I was 13. I have no memory of my initial impression of the movie, but I never forgot the fun theater experience.
Maybe that's why my sister and I reached for October Sky years later on a night when we needed some assurance. In 2008, we spent seven weeks traveling through New Zealand (a trip I'll elaborate on some other time, since it was majorly inspired by a certain movie series!). Almost without exception, we had a fabulous time and stayed in weird, but comfortable, hostels. Almost. 
We never planned farther ahead than the same evening, and it had always worked out, but one night we found ourselves coming into a little town that had remarkably little in the way of hostels. Nothing, actually. Night was setting in, and I had started to contemplate sleeping in the car, when we found a sort of oddly empty looking motel. 
We seemed to be the only guests, and as we were led to our "room" we started to think we might end up as cannibal food -- our bed for the night was in a freestanding structure that was, pretty much, a shipping container. We locked ourselves in and noticed that the interior walls were... fuzzy. And there were snails crawling on them. We huddled together in our bed, a hemisphere away from a familiar face, and decided that we needed to be transported. We opened our travel-DVD stash (because we are a family that always has a movie stash) and pulled out October Sky.

Spoilers ahead: 

It's a solid movie with a great cast - besides Gyllenhaal and the always-wonderful Cooper, there's Laura Dern as the inspiring teacher and Elya Baskin, a familiar face, as the shop tech who makes Homer's dreams reality. Gyllenhaal plays Homer Hickam, a real-life NASA engineer who started his life in the most poetically unlikely place - destined for a life underground in a West Virginia coal mine. He was inspired by Sputnik to build a rocket, and the movie is the story of his quest to escape his birthright and reach the stars. It's about how much help he gets, and how hard it is to let go.

The movie is full of cliches, but it works - maybe because it's true, but also because the actors and the script give everything real weight. It's almost absurd how perfect the balance is between Homer's two futures - down in the coal mines, breathing black dust with his father in his tiny hometown, or out in the openness of space, part of the first global effort. Joe Johnston, who also directed the first Captain America movie, may not have an auteur's flourish, but he knows how to make a solid, emotional movie. The climactic fight between Homer and his father is fantastic. The score is beautiful, in the way that so many 90s scores were. There's a moment in the movie - when Laura Dern's character, dying in the hospital, sees Homer's last rocket plume straight up into the clouds - that gives me chills every single time.
The movie's got great texture. It takes place in 1957, and Johnston lets a lot happen with that. There's the overwhelming fear of technology and the Russians - the newfound ability of humankind to utterly destroy itself is referenced throughout. Elya Baskin, working in the machine shop, is a European immigrant (like Homer's hero, Wernher von Braun) and refers obliquely to the horrors he escaped. 

There are a couple of weaknesses in the movie. The first I can forgive - the complete glossing over of Wernher von Braun's more questionable characteristics. The character appears only in a cameo, but Homer name-drops him throughout the film and regularly writes him. Von Braun was, of course, the father of American rocketry. He was also a Nazi, brought to the US through Operation Paperclip. He lived out his life in comfort. I don't think October Sky had the time to go into his past properly (nor did it need to, narratively) but it's still hard to see a Nazi treated like a hero.
The other problem is the TERRIBLE characterization of Homer's love interest, Valentine. The character has MAYBE three lines. For most of the movie, she moons over Homer while he moons over the peppiest girl in school. Then, with a weird, slow motion stare, she seems to hypnotize him into submission. Later, they are together. It's totally unexplained, undemonstrated, and unfortunate in movie that has two really wonderfully drawn female characters - Homer's inspiring teacher, Miss Riley, and his stubborn, loving mother. It would only have taken a few lines of dialogue to turn Valentine into an interesting person too.

The strongest part of the movie, for me, is in the characterization of Homer's father. John Hickam, in the hands of a lesser writer and actor, could have been one-note - the set-in-his-ways grump, the obstacle keeping our hero from his dreams, or at worst, the abuser. Homer's father, instead, is shown to be an honorable, admirable man, who wants Homer to follow in his footsteps not only because it's all he knows, but because he loves his work and believes in it. Homer's success is his tragedy - he has to let his son, so like him, go off into a world where he can't follow, can't help, and can't understand. By the end of the movie he accepts this. Homer's tragedy is that he has to leave his father behind. The brilliance in the movie is that this true story, which runs the risk of being cloyingly saccharine, is instead approached with enough depth to reveal its underlying sadness. 

Overall, October Sky is a wonderful movie - an interesting look at a crucial moment in recent history. It feels like home to me, although nothing could be further from my real home than the claustrophobic hills of West Virginia coal country. I identify with Homer's wonder at the rapid evolution of the human experience, and desire to be part of that change. I identify with Homer's father, afraid of losing everything he knows as the world changes too quickly. And I'll always be grateful to October Sky for keeping my sister and me alive on a creepy night in a fuzzy box on the other side of the world.

Tangled Skein

I've been having an odd month. After four years at the same retail job, I've run out of steam - customer service was not designed with the introverted in mind. My husband and I are adjusting to the (surprisingly) different rhythms of being married - every decision suddenly carries more weight, because it's now viewed through the scope of an entire future together. I've been doing a lot of soul-searching, with the result that we've decided to move, without knowing where. Our lease is up in a month and a half and we've already started packing boxes, with no concrete destination in sight. I excel at this type of blind leap - it's how I ended up in Los Angeles after college, and in Portland, Oregon a few years later. But it's different now. I have another person's life tied up with mine. If I make a wrong step, I'm taking the person I love most down with me. 

This is a roundabout way of saying that I'm confused, and tired, and all my yarn is packed up in boxes where I can't get at it. I kept my sock yarn aside, but I can't seem to find the desire to cast on. As each day comes to an end, I just want to curl up and hibernate so my brain can recover from another day of demanding customers. 

I'm truly hoping that once I leave my job (on a date fast, fast approaching!) my brain will have a chance to recover some flexibility and creativity. Once I leave Washington, a city that equates career with happiness, I see an even better chance. I don't know where we're going, but I hope it will be quieter, kinder, and more beautiful.

I just binge-read Luisa Weiss's lovely memoir My Berlin Kitchen.  I was surprised by how much her emotional struggles, and search for identity, moved me. She writes of trying to reconcile her European and American sides, and of giving up what she thought would bring her happiness to take a chance on the real thing. I find myself in a similar predicament - I'm working a job with people I mostly like, earning a (mostly) living wage, living in a perfectly nice (if too small by half) apartment in a cultural touchstone of a city - but it's not enough. I want something so different, but I don't know what it is! In some ways it seems foolish to give up what I have in search of a mysterious "something" but I'm finding it impossible to ignore the urge. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I still have to believe that there's something more out there waiting! Against all odds I found love in this ridiculous modern world. I thought that was the key to happiness, and it's certainly part of it - but now I need meaning. 

 I would say "stick with me", but I don't think there's anyone reading this! So stick with me, imaginary friend! I'm going to pull this thread and see what unravels.

Socks: Two Down, Two to Go!

My brilliant plan to trade off socks has reached its midpoint. The left foot is wearing My Cup of Tea. Unfortunately I've lost the label of the yarn, which I bought to take on our honeymoon - amazingly, I didn't actually get any knitting done! I used size 2 needles, so the sock came out larger than anticipated (the pattern only comes in one size.) Luckily, I happen to have a sister with much larger feet than me! I really like this pattern - it reminds me of Johnson's Wave, which I've knit before, but with a written-out pattern as opposed to a chart. I find it harder to keep my place on a chart, though I'm trying to get better! Also, the wave pattern is combined to the front of the sock, which makes it a faster knit. 

The right foot is wearing Jaywalker. I really enjoyed knitting this pattern, more than any other sock I've done, but the final product isn't actually my favorite! As pointed out in the notes at the beginning of the pattern, this sock has almost no stretch - a side effect of the stitch pattern. Every time I pull it on, I feel like I'm yanking it to death! Once on, however, it's very snug and comfy. My only other complaint is that because of the zigzag pattern, the top cuff of the sock is sort of bubbly and wavy and doesn't sit snug with my leg. There must be a way to remedy that! This is the first sock I've knit on #1 needles, and it fits much better than the socks I've made before! 

I think I'm slowly figuring out some general sock know-how. These socks had very different toes - one had me grafting the toe stitches with 14 stitches on the needle, the other just 7. I still have to use KnitWitch's kitchener stitch tutorial every time - eventually I'll have it memorized! I'm not sure which toe I prefer, but once I figure it out it's fun to know that I'll be able to customize my socks to my preference! I also found both of these socks a little long to me - I mean, they go up my legs a bit too far. If I can figure out how to lose a few inches of pattern, I wouldn't mind saving the yarn and having more low-rise socks. This will be easier on more vanilla patterns. I've actually never tried a straightforward vanilla sock - maybe that should be my next project!

But first, off to cast on socks #2...

Ten Worst Movies

My husband started to read me an internet compilation of the ten worst movies ever made. It went, in predictable order, "The Room, Troll 2, Birdemic…" 

I had to stop him. Not only is that list cliched at this point, but I vehemently disagree with it! I mean, no one who's ever watched that glorious trio would ever argue that they're not empirically, emphatically, ridiculously terrible in every way. Incompetently made, terribly acted, unintentionally hilarious… but never boring! Those movies have brought more joy to a greater audience than the filmmakers could ever have imagined. Beyond that, they've inspired love, and even more incredibly, creativity. My overwhelming thought upon leaving my first screening of Birdemic was, "My god! I could do that so much better!" I went right home and started mapping out my own disaster screenplay, knowing that with my home camcorder I could easily surpass James Nyugen.

Except, of course, I didn't. Most of us don't actually have the drive, the force of will, or the delusional belief in our own genius that leads to the auteur's creation. James Nyugen and Tommy Wiseau are more impressive than we give them credit for.

So, that being said, my definition of "worst movie" involves many things: being boring, being derivative, being sappy or manipulative, on top of the regular crimes of bad acting and production. I find mediocrity worse than terribleness, which at least is interesting!

These aren't in any particular order, except for #1, which I really, really think might be the worst. Although it gets VERY strong competition from #10.

1. Down to You

This stars Freddie Prinze Jr. It's deep because after he tries to commit suicide by drinking shampoo, he has a conversation with a spider. 

2. Simply Irresistible

It tries to do magic realism and… oh, it fails. A magical crab makes Sarah Michelle Gellar float.

3. Breakfast at Tiffany's

I really hate this movie. Racism aside (and how can you put it aside???) it's the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl story - the fascinating, lively dream girl is so original that she names her cat Cat! Wacky fun! SPARE ME. I think this one offends me the most because it is so beloved and so, so mediocre.

4. Bio-Dome

I admit that I just don't think Pauly Shore is funny. Also, my only viewing of this was on a bus stuck in traffic with my Amnesty International group somewhere between New York and Boston - not an ideal way to watch a new movie. Nevertheless, I feel confident in saying this movie sucks.

5. Yankee Doodle Dandy

Watching James Cagney prance around like a little pony is an experience I didn't need in life. 

6. Carefree

By far the worst Fred and Ginger movie of their ten, I find this pretty much unwatchable. The storyline is atrocious and offensive, but worse even than this - the dancing isn't great! The famous slow-motion dance scene manages to make Fred Astaire look ungainly. What a failure.

7. Vampires

I've already complained about this movie, my least favorite John Carpenter. My friend Randall made us watch it in college. I can barely stomach James Woods after this atrocity! Terrible effects, mean-spirited, boring.

8. Love, Actually
Pardon me for attacking sacred cows, but ugh, this movie! From the saccharine opening scene manipulating our heartstrings by evoking 9/11 to the creepy lack of autonomy demonstrated by almost every female character, this movie drives me nuts! There seems to have been a backlash in the last few years, which I appreciate. This movie did not age well.

9. Chicago
Best picture??? BEST picture??? This movie had one thing going for it: Catherine Zeta Jones's enthusiastic performance. It's always a joy to see a musical theater star get to show off their stuff on the big screen. Everything else was blah. I can barely accept that this movie beat out LOTR: The Two Towers, the weakest of the trilogy - but that it beat it for SET DESIGN as well??? And that it won best picture over Gangs of New York - a mess, but a mess with more creativity and artistry than Chicago could dream of - or The Hours? No.

10. HEARTBEEPS

This movie pollutes the air with its craziness.

WIP: Jaywalker Socks

As I've gotten back into knitting, I've found myself getting more and more interested in the kind of projects that once had only a utilitarian purpose. The making of basic objects that are now mass-produced fascinates me - wheels of cheese, loaves of bread, and pairs of socks, of course. I like getting back to the more personal focus of spending time and care creating the things that go onto and into our bodies.
Socks, as a project, are just so satisfying! I've gotten seriously obsessed. They're portable, quick, and useful once made (though I find it hard to wear them, honestly. I'm still too precious about them - I can't accept that they're meant to be used!) I've made a few pairs at this point, and I learn so much each time.

Right now, I'm in the middle of my fourth pair (well, I'm still in the middle of my third pair too!) I'm following the Jaywalker pattern, and it's by far my favorite pattern so far! It's easy (no complicated chart to reference) and, if you've chosen the right yarn, it's so fun to watch the zigzags form! The woman at my local yarn store recommended Frolicking Feet as being a very satisfying self-striper (which I've never used before) and she was right! I'm using the colorway "Sailor's Delight" and it's AWESOME.

As I said, this pattern is so easy - the zigs are made by a simple repeat of making extra stitches and then passing stitches over. I guess it could seem monotonous, but I've found that watching the stripes form balances that out. Besides, this is an ideal knit-while-watching-a-movie project - my favorite!

I'm almost done with the first sock. Of course, a fact of sock knitting (and a possible drawback) is that after you finish one, you have to start all over again with the other. Luckily, as I said, I have another sock project going at the same time! Maybe I'll trade off socks indefinitely, and never get bored...

They Live

Amazingly, given my mom's taste in schlock, I never saw a John Carpenter movie until I went to college. My friend Randall opened my mind in short order. I think the first Carpenter movie we watched was The Thing, though I know we screened most of his (good) oeuvre in short order - and that brilliant movie remains one of my favorites to this day.

Carpenter movies fall into three distinct categories: the simple and assuredly brilliant (The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13, Escape From New York), the terrible but still enjoyable (Village of the Damned, Prince of Darkness, Ghosts of Mars), and the unwatchable (Vampires). 

And, of course, there's They Live. It was sandwiched somewhere in my Carpenter crash course, maybe between Big Trouble in Little China and the terribly unfortunate Vampires. It's an impossibly simple premise - a man finds out that aliens are infiltrating earth, gets a big shotgun, and blows them away until he gets blown away. The burn is almost too slow - a dialogue-less into that leads into at least half an hour of inaction before any actual plot progression. And the star is a pro wrestler - "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, about as good an actor as you'd expect. 

But it all works. What you get is a tonal, atmospheric world, inhabited by the downtrodden but warmhearted, oppressed by the moneygrubs in power. Piper, a strong, silent loner (perhaps strategically silent, to capitalize on Piper's strengths?) is a classic reluctant hero - repeatedly selfish, stubborn, and crude, he is forced by circumstance to save the world and sacrifice his life. He's called Nada - literally nothing - a nobody.

Three good scenes and no bad scenes. Howard Hawks's criteria for a great movie. 

They Live's great scenes:

1. The scene when he first wears the glasses.

One thing that makes this scene great is the revelation that aliens have infiltrated the earth, and the way in which they've done it. Every billboard, advertisement, newspaper, and $20 bill is revealed to be a piece of subliminal messaging, encouraging us to OBEY, SUBMIT, CONSUME. It's a condemnation of consumer culture and an amazing, unforgettable visual feat. The aliens themselves are revealed, under their perfect perms and designer suits, to be glowing, rotting corpses.

Then there's Roddy Piper's performance. He plays the disbelief, the horror, and the humor of the scene perfectly. The simplicity of the sunglasses is perfect - they're never really explained because they don't have to be.

2. The scene at the bank.

Nada has a good heart, but he's kinda dumb. That's why, when he finds out aliens have taken over Earth, he figures the best thing to do is take a shotgun downtown and start blowing them away. It all boils down to one line: "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum."

3. The fight scene.

What was scripted as a 20-second dustup as Nada forces the glasses onto the disbelieving Frank turned into a FIVE MINUTE AND 20 SECOND brutal beating as the two of them smashed car windshields, kicked each other's knees, and practically killed each other. Supposedly, Keith David and Piper choreographed the fight on their own and Carpenter was so impressed that he kept the whole thing. It's a piece of beautiful absurdity and brutality, laced with bits of strange realism - at one point when Nada smashes Frank's car window, he apologizes, horrified, before continuing to beat him up. At another point he bursts out laughing. It's one of the best fights in film history.

Honorable mention: Holly beats Nada.

Nada, on the run from the law/aliens, kidnaps a woman, Holly (Meg Foster, owner of terrifyingly pale eyes). He forces his way into her car and then her apartment. She is terrified, but you sense that she is also intrigued by his story. You sense her warming to him, and you can see where it's going - he's going to win her to his side, she's going to help him, they're going to have a romance.

Then - nope. He stands in the wrong place, and she shoves him through a plate glass window. He falls halfway down a mountain. We don't see her again until she reappears on her own terms. It's a delightful genre-tipping moment, and illustrates one of the things that make Carpenter movies, to me, stand out from all the other small-group, survival-situation movies out there: By and large, Carpenter characters make smart, or at least understandable, decisions. They do what they would do in real life, instead of contorting in strange ways to make the plot work. Sure, some characters do stupid things - see Nada shooting up the bank in broad daylight, or Jack Burton doing any of the things Jack Burton does in Big Trouble in Little China. They do dumb things because they're dumb, though. Not because the plot requires them to be dumb just for a minute. The characters in John Carpenter movies feel like real people.

Roddy Piper, you will be missed. You'll never run out of bubblegum in heaven.