Some more love for my favorite Sesame Street character. This time he sings Tom Waits. He should totally host SNL (Cookie Monster, not Tom Waits...:P)
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Friday, August 26, 2011
I was surfing the internet when some article mentioned Lisa Kudrow´s Commencement Address at Vassar College in May 2010. Being a member of that graduating class, and having been sitting in a white chair sweating through my nice dress and polyester graduation robe in the Poughkeepsie humid air to actually witness the event, it brought me back and made me reflect a little about what she said that day.
To begin with, I vaguely remember people being kind of ambivalent about the selection of Lisa Kudrow as our speaker to begin with (my freshman and sophomore year roommate OM thought Hilary Clinton should do the honors, but then again, in almost Chuck Norris fashion, she thought Hilary Clinton was the answer to pretty much any problem - which was funny because a big group of us thought OM was our own version of Chuck Norris. She is one of the few people I´ve met that I can really label as being Badass. The other is M. M is super badass.). I liked the idea of it. Except for the fact that I didn´t realize that I would be getting my diploma in front of 4000 people and 2 very famous, very incredible actresses. My worries on commencement day were limited to frizz control, the zipper in my dress that wouldn´t zip, and not tripping in front of Meryl Streep and Lisa Kudrow. I failed on the first two accounts but thankfully succeeded in the third.
Anyways, I think the speech was very good and had some great pearls of wisdom for both us (the soon-to-be grads) and our parents. My parents really enjoyed it as well - my dad (a university educator by profession who has seen his fair share of commencement addresses) thought it was one of the best he had ever heard. But the best thing about it is that I fully credit Lisa Kudrow (and her speech) for really turning my parents around on the whole film thing.
Her words were:
¨By November of 1985, I declared that I would pursue acting. My parents and family were thrilled for me and that was the first and most important, wonderful show of support I got. (Look at parents) My parents and family were thrilled, THRILLED. Truly. My Vassar friends were shocked, SHOCKED but supportive and polite. I . . .was terrified, and not because I didn't think it would work out — I was weirdly confident...for no reason at all — but because this didn't exactly feel like it was a choice as much as succumbing to a compulsion, and I didn't analyze what led me to this point, whether it was divine intervention, or a lapse in judgment or sanity, I just listened to that inner voice.¨
My parents actually took her advice. They stopped (for the most part) telling me to go into something practical and provided emotional and financial support to establish my own film production company. They were also they financial backers of several business trips to film markets around the world.
If I ever meet Lisa Kudrow, please remind me that I owe her a huge huge huge hug and a very big thank you.
Here´s the full address for your viewing pleasure:
Sunday, August 21, 2011
So I got into a pretty bad discussion with a friend yesterday and decided to take my mind off of it by baking. Cooking and baking and exercising are usually my go-to activities when I feel particularly stressed or upset. Yesterday I decided to make for the second time, these Cherry Mud Cupcakes that I found in a cupcake book I bought way back when I was in college and spotted the book on sale at B&N for $3. I´ve made them before, and they came out really well so I decided to give them a second shot but also decided to experiment a bit with them.
The recipe actually calls for 1/4 cup of Cherry Liquor, but lacking in Cherry liquor and feeling a little bit more alcoholic than usual, I substituted that for 3/4 cup of equal parts Malamado (a Malbec fortified wine from Argentina. Very nice stuff) and Whiskey. I wasn´t sure how they´d come out, but I figured that my brother and his friends could wolf down the batch if anything went wrong. Thankfully, it didn´t. It actually came out really well. And now I am going to call these cakes "Malamados" (which is a mash of the phrase Mal Amados meaning "Ill-loved").
I covered them with dark chocolate ganache which I added a decent splash of Malamado to as well. Delicious!
Here they are:
The Minis I made:
And the full-sized:
The brown stuff around the big ones is the Ganache. The unfortunate side-effect of adding Malamado to the Ganache is that the Ganache doesn´t completely emulsify, so I had to sort of pour the ganache over the cupcakes to sort of decorate them. But consistency set aside, that ganache is pretty damn awesome. It also makes a really delicious Chocolate-Malamado Ice Cream.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Ecuador is currently undergoing a bit of a tumultuous transitional period. Transition into what, I am not entirely sure about, but it is nonetheless a transition. It started last September with the 30-S riots. It is the fourth major political upheaval the country has seen in the past 16 years. And the fourth Coup d´Etat as well. Yes. It was a Coup d´Etat. I will firmly maintain that it was a Coup d´Etat - it did not start as one, but the President turned it into one. I´m not a fan of the President. His methods are questionable, and he surrounds himself with a bunch of sniveling weasels that really are the problem with the government. I think that he has good intentions, but also remember that the road to hell is paved with good intentions - and with that in mind, the whole country is being led down into mouth of Erebus itself. Also, the man has an attitude problem that often gets him into trouble. I don´t particularly agree with his political ideologies (I don´t particularly agree with most political ideologies in fact) but I´m not that militant about disproving their validity as a lot of people I know are.
That being said, I am most certainly am not in favor of all the stuff going on right now. A journalist and the newspaper he wrote for were just sued for $45 million and 3 years in prison, and found guilty, by the president for defamation of character and disrespect for the office of the presidency because the journalist wrote a piece criticizing the government. The event echoes the feeling of experiencing 30-S from my house - information filtered through the national channels that were suddenly all overridden by the one government-controlled channel, who cried against the rebels curtailing their "freedom of speech" when they cut the wires that allowed them to override all the other channels. Part of me is kind of scared. Rumors are flying around about the government monitoring Facebook posts and blogs and even emails for stuff that could be potentially volatile. But then, part of me reminds me that, well, this isn´t exactly a first-world country, and judging by other rumors, I doubt they can really take in such a huge scope. That being said, it still feels like it is the death of free speech here. And that in itself is tragic.
However, I get mad when people start comparing what is going on here with China´s (and by China, I mean the part of China known as The People´s Republic of China) recent (the last 100 years, which in the scope of Chinese history is very recent) history. Today I read a comment on Facebook about how what is happening here is even worse than what happened in China. There was also someone else back in October that made a careless remark about Mao Zedong and how he seems tame in comparison to the President. This makes me mad because that comment was made out of ignorance of the complexities of the rise of the modern PRC. Yes, freedom of speech is dying here, but it is nothing, and I do mean NOTHING in comparison to what happened in the 50´s, 60´s and 70´s in China. I love China, don´t get me wrong, there are many many good things about it, but that being said, it has gone through one hell of a transformation to get where it is, and is still continuing on that path. We cannot even begin to really understand what it was like for the people of the time to go through ages such as The Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. We cannot even begin to understand what it was like to recover from that, to be reborn from that, to carry those traumas in our modern personal and cultural identities. We cannot even begin to understand the mindframe of Chinese culture. So radically different than our own Western standard, but just as immensely rich and complex. All it takes is to stand in Confucius´s tomb, or the Longmen Grottoes or any other of the many cultural landmarks traumatized by these periods and stare at the 2000-year-old decapitated Buddhas and 1000-year-old graffitied grave markers and feel the weight of that destruction, feel the weight of the decisions behind that destruction, and the people behind those decisions. All it takes is to talk to the ordinary Chinese middle-aged guy who cannot stomach Xiao Baicai (Little Chinese Cabbage) because that is all he ate for 2 years during his childhood. All it takes is to stare at the way parents cherish their one child as they play among the spring peonies.
I am not saying that the PRC´s tumultuous modern history didn´t have its good aspects too. It did. In a bizarre way, it opened up a lot of opportunities for a lot of the Chinese population that would have not had access to them otherwise. But the opening of these opportunities came at a huge cost, one we cannot even begin to fathom. It is a complex issue - the rise of modern China. Full of ups and downs. And it is weighty and huge.
So no, our problems are not in any way comparable to China´s, just as China´s problems are not in any way comparable to ours. It feels like a 10-year-old child comparing their problems to and claiming to understand the problems faced by a 60-year-old adult. So, at the risk of sounding a little crass, to all of you making careless remarks about this issue: get your ignorant asses to a Chinese History course and get some perspective.
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