Author Archives: Tata

I Feel And I Feel When

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Photo: Bob Hosh. Lilies at Longwood Gardens.

Every morning, I get up in the dark, pad upstairs accompanied by at least two feline companions and turn on the TV at a deafening volume. I row for a while while Mike and Darlene shout the headlines. We painted the attic a whispering yellow-green that reminds one of spring’s earliest shoots, so sometimes I forget to turn on the lights. The cats love the attic, which is wide and long, reasonably clean and mostly used as a guest room. Thing is: it doesn’t have a floor. It has 90 year old subfloor boards that mostly don’t meet and 100 year old wool rug that came to America with Pete’s grandfather. I’m allergic to the rug and to doing yoga where there’s no flat surface, so we’re making a floor. We shopped for weeks. Home Depot had the pressboard at a good price and was running a special on carpet installation.

Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community’s top legislative priority.

Participants on the October 17 call — including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG — were urged to persuade their clients to send “large contributions” to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.

Bernie Marcus, the charismatic co-founder of Home Depot, led the call along with Rick Berman, an aggressive EFCA opponent and founder of the Center for Union Facts. Over the course of an hour, the two framed the legislation as an existential threat to American capitalism, or worse.

“This is the demise of a civilization,” said Marcus. “This is how a civilization disappears. I am sitting here as an elder statesman and I’m watching this happen and I don’t believe it.” […]

“This bill may be one of the worst things I have ever seen in my life,” he said, explaining that he could have been on “a 350-foot boat out in the Mediterranean,” but felt it was more important to engage on this fight. “It is incredible to me that anybody could have the chutzpah to try and pass this bill in this election year, especially when we have an economy that is a disaster, a total absolute disaster.”

East Brunswick Lumber delivered the boards on Monday. Pete sawed the 8’x4′ boards in half. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a 5′ woman carry a 4’x4′ panel up three flights of stairs. Good thing I exercise! In the meantime, I wrote Home Depot’s customer service, to tell the troubled retailer I was cozying up to new hardware and lumber suppliers. They responded:

Thank you for contacting The Home Depot Customer Care in this matter.

Our founder and former CEO was obviously using hyperbole to make a point about a specific piece of legislation, the Employee Free Choice Act, and we will be sure to pass your comments along to him.

As it relates to EFCA, like most other retailers – including our main competitors – we think it’s a bad bill that takes away American workers’ right to a secret ballot, which is the most basic element of any democracy.

We look forward to your continued patronage and assisting you with all of your home improvement needs.

I was born at night, but not last night.

The bill does not, in fact, remove workers’ rights to a secret ballot. It removes management’s ability to harass card signers. Thus, you are perpetrating a falsehood. If you know that, you’re lying. If you do not know that, you’ve been misled.

Further, if you’re an American worker, and you side with management, you are working against your own and my interests. I’m union, as are many of the tradesmen and tradeswomen who shop your stores. Or did. I’ve made large purchases at Home Depot every week for almost a year, and as of last week, I’ve begun making them elsewhere. Can you, at a time when Home Depot’s financial pitfalls are common knowledge, freely alienate your customer base?

If you can, you deserve the failure ahead. This is a very serious business. People have died for the right to unionize and your boss’ hyperbole trivializes their sacrifice. Feel free to pass that on.

To paraphrase the ads: We can do it – without their help.

And I, I Could See

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I’ve zipped my lips about blog politics for a good reason: mostly, I don’t get it. I’m much too self-involved to understand the characters in As the Blogosphere Turns or I forgot soy milk again and the coffee in my office is super weak. I don’t even have a blogroll. That would sound funny with a Scottish accent: I dunnaugh een hae a blogrooool. Please see skippy, whom I personally adore, for why today matters.

Life Before Was Tragic Now I Know

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Sometimes, my people can be astonishingly stupid.

The drive to make Italians eat Italian, which was described by the Left and leading chefs as gastronomic racism, began in the town of Lucca this week, where the council banned any new ethnic food outlets from opening within the ancient city walls.

Yesterday it spread to Lombardy and its regional capital, Milan, which is also run by the centre Right. The antiimmigrant Northern League party brought in the restrictions “to protect local specialities from the growing popularity of ethnic cuisines”.

Luca Zaia, the Minister of Agriculture and a member of the Northern League from the Veneto region, applauded the authorities in Lucca and Milan for cracking down on nonItalian food. “We stand for tradition and the safeguarding of our culture,” he said.

Milan. Really? Recent host of the Olympics?

You can find a motherfucker anywhere. There’s one now. Here’s a hint: the guy who says he stands for tradition is really interested in dismantling everyone else’s.

Mr Zaia said that those ethnic restaurants allowed to operate “whether they serve kebabs, sushi or Chinese food” should “stop importing container loads of meat and fish from who knows where” and use only Italian ingredients.

Asked if he had ever eaten a kebab, Mr Zaia said: “No – and I defy anyone to prove the contrary. I prefer the dishes of my native Veneto. I even refuse to eat pineapple.”

Good. More for me. Also: my family’s from there so I happen to remember the Veneto’s vast empire was based on trade with the entire world, such as it was, including pineapple growers.

Mehmet Karatut, who owns one of four kebab shops in Lucca, said that he used Italian meat only.

Davide Boni, a councillor in Milan for the Northern League, which also opposes the building of mosques in Italian cities, said that kebab shop owners were prepared to work long hours, which was unfair competition.

What? What? What what what? What?

“This is a new Lombard Crusade against the Saracens,” La Stampa, the daily newspaper, said. The centre-left opposition in Lucca said that the campaign was discrimination and amounted to “culinary ethnic cleansing”.

Vittorio Castellani, a celebrity chef, said: “There is no dish on Earth that does not come from mixing techniques, products and tastes from cultures that have met and mingled over time.”

He said that many dishes thought of as Italian were, in fact, imported. The San Marzano tomato, a staple ingredient of Italian pasta sauces, was a gift from Peru to the Kingdom of Naples in the 18th century. Even spaghetti, it is thought, was brought back from China by Marco Polo, and oranges and lemons came from the Arab world.

Unfortunately, stupid seems contagious in Lombardy. Well, except for the chefs, who seem to know something – I can’t put my finger on it – about food?

Mr Castellani said that the ban reflected growing intolerance and xenophobia in Italy. It was also a blow to immigrants who make a living by selling ethnic food, which is popular because of its low cost. There are 668 ethnic restaurants in Milan, a rise of nearly 30 per cent in one year.

The centre Right won national elections in April last year partly because of alarm about crime and immigration. This week there was a series of attacks on immigrants in bars and shops after the arrest of six Romanians accused of gang-raping an Italian girl in the Rome suburb of Guidonia.

Filippo Candelise, a Lucca councillor, said: “To accuse us of racism is outrageous. All we are doing is protecting the culinary patrimony of the town.”

Your crusade against kebabs will curtail rape complaints. I’m almost sure of it!

Massimo Di Grazia, the city spokesman, said that the ban was intended to improve the image of the city and to protect Tuscan products. “It targets McDonald’s as much as kebab restaurants,” he added.

There is confusion, however, over what is meant by ethnic. Mr Di Grazia said that French restaurants would be allowed. He was unsure, though, about Sicilian cuisine. It is influenced by Arab cooking.

…And invaded by everyone who every built a rowboat. My family’s from there also, which would probably skeeve Mr. Di Grazia just a bit. I happen to know the Sicilians hate him back; that whole occupation thing, you know.

Anyway, this campaign is going to backfire because meat on sticks is undeniably delicious.

Phone’ll Jingle Door’ll Knock

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We’re walking through the park at an impressive clip.

Tata: Okay okay okay, so the other day, I said, “Pete, I’d like a bread machine for my birthday and he said, “That’s good. I just ordered you one.”
Leilani: It’s your birthday?
Tata: It’s in a couple of weeks, but I’m like a crazy planner. Yesterday, it arrived, hooray!
Leilani: Hooray!
Tata: By midnight, we’d already had two disastrous doughs and this morning, I tore the one we baked into bird-size hunks. Of course, I left them at home. Sorry, geese!
Leilani: Why are we here?
Tata: Two years ago, my dad got sick and I went to Virginia for a month. I blogged about it the whole time and I know it was sometimes very hard for readers to deal with how awful it was, and how funny. I mean, picture saying to people, “Please read about my dad’s hilarious death.”
Leilani: Omigod, how did you know? Yesterday, we went to see the rabbi and everyone talked at the same time. I can’t imagine what people walking by thought, with the sobbing and roaring laughter.
Tata: What did you do last night?
Leilani: My friend Ranit came over. We went to Charlie Brown’s and it was really nice. Quiet there. She doesn’t drink but I did. I laughed and laughed, then I wondered what people might think.
Tata: Listen, you won’t know what’s going to help you grieve until you stumble upon it, so be prepared to stumble. Fortunately, you can stumble home from that place.
Leilani: I haven’t got anything to wear to the service tomorrow.
Tata: Anyone’s judgment is misplaced. You can go in a bathrobe, if it’s cozy.
Leilani: Thank you for talking to me like this.
Tata: Pfffft, when Daria, Todd, Dara and I were in Virginia, we started doing this chanting thing. I mean, who can explain that? One day, we were normal nutbags. Next thing we knew we were standing around the kitchen, warbling about who was getting the paper towels to clean up the garlic off the floor. I don’t know what that means, but I do think you should start a blog immediately. Immortalize your antics.
Leilani: Really? I’ll think about it.
Tata: Good. Later, Pete and I will do donuts around a parking lot while I fling handfuls of gummy failed bread into the air while birdies roil and scream.
Leilani: You’re coming back to the park?
Tata: Absolutely. And I’ll blog the duck ruckus, because should that be lost in the mists of time?

Well, Maybe Not An Elephant

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This has been bothering me for months: SNL’s Fred Armisen as Barack Obama.

Is this blackface? What is it?

In fact, why in 2009 is there one African-American actor in SNL’s cast list?

I’m no credentialed cultural critic. I went to college – drove there five days a week for twenty-three years, in fact – but I don’t have a theory about why this is or isn’t flying, except that the cast keeps growing in size, the women are starting to look very similar and and they keep adding white guys. So what’s happening here? Why am I increasingly uncomfortable with what I see?

This is a very respectful treatment of our President’s character – affectionate, even. But someday it won’t be. Sometime, Mr. Obama will do something the writers don’t like. When this bit goes south, it’ll be a disaster.

Updated to reflect Siobhan might be right about a few things. Like.

He Brought Home the Bacon So That

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Johnny, our Southwest Bureau Chief, is off the sauce.

I’m putting weight on. My upper body is filling back out again. I feel stronger. Despite the aches and pains, it feels good to live in a body. Quantum physics says I don’t have one, that there’s no such thing as matter, that I’m more of a cloud of potential dispositions of energy, that my body only really exists when I touch another object, that then the particles squeeze together into what we think of as matter only in the section of me that’s touching the object, but that I don’t actually touch the object, that when my particles squeeze together tight like that, that compression creates an energy field that repels the other object, so that in fact I don’t ever really touch it. I wish I had known that when I got in all those car accidents. But then I’d probably still be driving that brown Volvo station wagon with no heat or air conditioning. And that wouldn’t be good.

In the course of the holiday season, I heard more about substance abuse and abusers than I have at any time since I quit hanging out at that bar I don’t mention anymore. But really. Half my friends were hooked on something. I think this is a symptom.

Callers reach the counselors at 800-854-7771 for free. It’s the same number Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa firmly and clearly broadcasted, after the murder-suicide of seven people Tuesday in the working class neighborhood of Wilmington.

Erwin Lupoe and his wife, Ana, had been fired from their jobs a week before the Wilmington tragedy. But whether job loss stems from a firing or a layoff, the effects are traumatic.

“I don’t think it’s ever been this bad. Not in my tenure,” [Elizabeth] Gore said. “Because the people that we’re dealing with now, they have always had [money]. They went to school, they were able to get jobs. Now the jobs are not even out there.”

Supervisors at the call-in center say many of these calls are not strictly about mental-health issues, but deal with lapsed medical insurance, foreclosure, bank problems and unemployment benefits.

Oh boy. This week, House Democrats sold women – particularly poor women, but really all women – down the river when they removed family planning from the stimulus package. It’s health care and they removed it to get Republican votes the package was never going to get in the first place. Sad. The Democrats look like patsies. Poor women get shafted AGAIN. The Republicans look like Lucy van Pelt holding a football. Our economic situation is so serious we should really expect believers in a disastrous, failed ideology to demonstrate some humility, but no. Meanwhile, outside the Beltway, life as we know it has been falling apart for some time now.

There are 12 parking lots across Santa Barbara that have been set up to accommodate the growing middle-class homelessness. These lots are believed to be part of the first program of its kind in the United States, according to organizers.

The lots open at 7 p.m. and close at 7 a.m. and are run by New Beginnings Counseling Center, a homeless outreach organization.

It is illegal for people in California to sleep in their cars on streets. New Beginnings worked with the city to allow the parking lots as a safe place for the homeless to sleep in their vehicles without being harassed by people on the streets or ticketed by police.

Harvey stays at the city’s only parking lot for women. “This is very safe, and that’s why I feel very comfortable,” she said.

Nancy Kapp, the New Beginnings parking lot coordinator, said the group began seeing a need for the lots in recent months as California’s foreclosure crisis hit the city hard. She said a growing number of senior citizens, women and lower- and middle-class families live on the streets.

I am tired of calculation and bad faith negotiating. I’m tired of cowardice and coersion. Though I try to live peacefully, I find myself longing for the song of the guillotine and for our own Bastille Day. What does Johnny say?

Pop Tarts rock.

Heaven help us if they discover the wah wah pedal.

Too Many Holes In the Crust of the Earth

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I.

Daria: Why are you calling me at 10 p.m.?
Tata: Because that happens to be now.
Daria: No, why are you calling me at 10 p.m.?
Tata: Did you know that between meals other people stop eating?
Daria: I did not know that.
Tata: It rings – like – a distant bell, doesn’t it?
Daria: Yeah, maybe I’ll put my snack down and think about it.

II.

Three-Year-Old: What’s this?
Tata: It’s a garden stake with a friendly face. It keeps your plants company.
TYO: It doesn’t scare the birds?
Tata: No, sweetheart. A face in the garden doesn’t scare birds.
TYO: What about scarecrows?

III.

Tata: I am a genius and I know this because I am an idiot!
Leilani Goldberg: D’ya ever take a number to have a talk with yourself?
Tata: Okay okay okay so you know how my hip flexors have been tight like angry fists and causing me fairly consistent and debilitating agony?
Leilani: Yes…?
Tata: So the other night, I get off the rowing machine, which usually buys me about two hours pain-free, and suddenly I have one of those blinding revelations that makes you feel brilliant and stupid at the same time. Ready? ‘While my muscles are warm, why don’t I stretch my hip flexors?’
Leilani: And what happened?
Tata: No pain for a whole day. I’m a genius! And I’m an idiot! Because I have known since we had baby teeth that stretching is the answer but did I get down on the floor?
Leilani: The floor is your friend.
Tata: I’m surprised my friend took me back.

IV.

Tata: Pete, dinner is spectacular.
Pete: Thank you!
Tata: I’m glad you quit that hideous restaurant. That place always made you angry.
Pete: I’m thinking about working as a personal chef.
Tata: That’s good. Your cooking deserves a wider audience, and if it doesn’t get one, dahhhhhling, I will become that wider audience.

V.

An ice storm is coming. I feel this in every fiber of my being. Even so there is reason for delight: the seed catalogs have arrived. They bring new magic words: self-pollenating fruit trees. Now is the time to dream of fragrant, sunny afternoons.

Where She Is Now I Can Only Guess

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ThinkProgress: this fucker doesn’t make the cut on the varsity cogitating team.

Jesse Taylor:

Kefalinos denies intimating that Obama would be assassinated, and insists that the cookie is “not unflattering. I think it’s a fun face… And anyone who says anything else should be ashamed of themselves.” Besides, nobody got upset about the “Dead Geese Bread” he sold after the recent Hudson River plane crash. (We’re NOT making that up.) Also, Kefalinos insists he can’t be racist because, for one thing, “my brother-in-law, he’s Cuban.”

I like that ubiquitous “I can’t be a racist because [someone else] is [something]” rationale. It’s priceless. By that reasoning, I can’t be a racist because sasquatch is lemurs.

He Does Seems To Come Out Right

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Sorry I’ve been quiet. Bit of a snowstorm beating a path across my brainstem. I considered curling up into a ball on the couch but I didn’t actually feel bad – just stupid, and when I say I felt stupid, I think I actually sat at my desk yesterday and stared into space. I’m not sure precisely because I was, you know, stupid. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that sometime this week the kitten here, whom we’re now calling by the first common noun that springs to mind despite our settling on Piccolina as a Bugs Bunny-inspired moniker, has taken to waking me up by flopping down on my head, licking my hair and stabbing me with her adorably needle-like kitten claws. This is not the first time a pussycat decided to festively recoif me. You will note the kitten practices what she sees the older cats do, including sharing glasses of water with me. Water is especially delicious if I’ve taken a few sips from the cup. Pete makes faces, but he forgets he’s covered with the spit of adoring kitties. Drink up, girlies!