purejuice

Originally posted by roadnotes at Stop the Arizona birth control bill

This is my quest, for budget, health and happiness, in 2012. I don't want to fall back on purchased lunch meat or leftovers, but rather to have something special for lunch, with an emphasis on omega threes and greens. The previous fallback has been home-roasted org turkey breast, which is very easy and which I'm very fond of, but which can be pricey and less greeny and fishy than variety suggests.

So far we have had

• home-made Spam (Fannie Farmer's ham loaf with Costco ham ground at home and frozen in 1 lb. packages),
• ditto salmon loaf (not cheap. but better and cheaper with frozen wild-caught filets: I need to investigate Costco's farm-raised filets),
• home-brined tongue
• ricotta spinach pie (>:-P)
• very garlicky hummus made in 10-minutes with beans soaked overnight and cooked in the pressure cooker, served with demi-peeled cucumber dice
• Cafe Lula's awesome peanut butter, sambal, sprouts, cukes, and when in season, tomato Tineka sandwich,
• chick pea and lentil dal, with Basmati rice, brocolli, and tamarind-date chutney, which may be the perfect vegan meal...except for the quantities of CLARIFIED BUTTER in the dal
• Fergus Henderson's lima bean/cauli/leek salad
• and etc.

Goals have been to steer away from cholesterol and nitrates. (Successful: I had a slice of bacon about two months ago and I nearly passed out. WOW.) And to up fish and greens. (Remind me to add sardines, smoked, in oil, to my grocery list. Licious.)

The least successful of the purpose-built for lunch dishes was the ghastly ricotta-spinach pie, which was also too ugly to want. Given two dozen farm-laid eggs, I splurged on a frittata with a ton of Parm and brocolli rabe, which is possibly among the best leftovers on the planet and full of greens.

Some of my favorite greens ingestion methods are

• a bag of defrosted frozen spinach mixed into a nutmeggy, garlicky turkey/pork/beef loaf
• beans and greens, like chard in pureed white bean soup, or escarole sauteed with garlic and white canellinis and, finally,
• a huge veg soup, tons of celery, carrot, onion, beans, thyme with a bunch of kale in chiffonade.

A big veg soup, with beefy stock and tomato and a few beans with lots of veg makes a very satisfying light hot cheap lunch. As the Asians know. Salad I find disheartening for lunch.

I have re-invested in this cookbook, deacquisitioned two moves ago, because as I recall she has great menus, good recipes for cold green soups and summery picnic dishes for keeping in the fridge, and obvs everything is cooked ahead. I like to cook every two days and freeze my own Lean Cuisines. I think this book will work for me. Maybe I'll cook my way through this and Elizabeth David's Summer Cooking this summer. Mmmmm.


http://www.amazon.com/Cold-Cuisine-Helen-Hecht/dp/0689111304

Today, it's Texas caviar, with frozen home-cooked black-eyed peas, and the Homesick Texan's bumpin' recipe. You have got to try it. Do the Rotel. You know you want to. And read the chile's blog.

This was only slightly less electrifying than the original New York magazine story.
http://nymag.com/nightlife/features/45933/

Nik Cohn sort of made the whole story up.

But we really did walk down the street that way. Thanks, Bee Gees.

The silence here is overwhelming.

In the 1970s, Sander Vanocur told me something I've been thinking about ever since. The political satire in Johnny Carson's monologue, he said, defined heartland political issues.

So it came as no surprise to me that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are a primary source of news for the young. The people whose knickers get in a twist around that haven't been paying attention, first of all, to many things about journalism, beginning with the fact that the New Journalism (invented at Esquire magazine in the 1960s), now half a century old, imparted new information about what was then the counterculture in a new way. Talese' story on Frank Sinatra is considered the first wave of all the dreary j-school classes of what I now think they call creative non-fiction?
http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ1003-OCT_SINATRA_rev_

Don't go to j school, was the advice I was given. Study philosophy, history, phys ed, pottery. You can learn journalism in six weeks. So can its consumers, and so they do.

People whose knickers get into a twist about Stewart and Colbert being peoples' primary source of news may or may not be professors of journalism, stuffed shirts, or white boys with a vested interest in circle-jerk method of covering politics, of which Politico in the successful internet avatar. I think we know who the wedgie ones are:

Venise Wagner, associate chair of the journalism department at San Francisco State University, argues with her students over whether "The Daily Show" is real journalism. They think it is; she tells them it isn't, explaining that journalism involves not just conveying information but also following a set of standards that includes verification, accuracy and balance.

But she says "The Daily Show" does manage to make information relevant in a way that traditional news organizations often do not, and freedom from "balance" shapes its success. "'The Daily Show' doesn't have to worry about balance. They don't have to worry about accuracy, even. They can just sort of get at the essence of something, so it gives them much more latitude to play around with the information, to make it more engaging," Wagner says.
http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=4329

I have no stats on this, but my nose for news tells me the boys-on-the-back-of-bus coverage is alienating to voters, and assists the unscrupulous right in its 40 year mission to keep voter turnout low, so they can win, by defining single issues like abortion or same-sex marriage as political matters, which they're not. I submit to you not that women know better, but that what real political coverage is what the League of Women Voters does. The League of Women Voters writes non-partisan policy papers delineating issues without prejudice. I am not familiar enough with their work to say whether or not they add a one-sentence value neutral assessment of what place this issue takes in bona fide conservative (not party) philosophy, and in bona fide liberal philosophy. I suspect they avoid this. I think respectful attention to non-partisan political philosophy is central to the democracy, to political issues, and to what people want to know about the news.

The parsing of the political news for its real meaning is what Stewart and Colbert do. This is what political coverage of 21st century news should be doing, League of Women Voters issues analysis in a cellphone screen-sized format. Naturally Stewart and Colbert parse stories with LULZ value, and this is bias of their news coverage. I learned from the hordes of people of every color watching Jerry Springer that yeah, people like freaks, geeks, and catfights. But they are absolute junkies for adjudication. The developmental psychiatrist Kohlberg based an entire sexist male template on little boys' penchant for adjudication -- you could say it was arguing over whether or not the ball was inside or outside. Concentration camp survivors say the observation of injustice, of everything one can suffer in extremity, is extremity's most corrosive experiece. Primo Levi writes, in The Reawakening:

...the shame a just man experiences...at another man's crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have prevailed in defense.

Having our noses rubbed in the shameless injustice of politics as practiced for the cameras and for Politico, for the jockeying social aspirations and tin soldier power plays of editors from Wauchula, causes the metaphysical guilt which keeps us from voting.

In any case, adjudication seems nearly instinctual, and the horse race version of it still forms the way newspapers, online and elsewhere, still cover politics. The competition between politicians is of no interest to us. We like competitive sports -- I am noting the importance of soccer players and fandom in the Islamist Algerian wars and in the Egyptian spring uprising -- we like freaks and geeks, but covering politics like sports keeps us away from the polls and empowers the heartlessly cynical new right puppetmeisters of the racist hegemony of the last 40 years. One old hippie I know says he doesn't even think they're racist. They just use it as a tactic. I respect a racist more.

The New Journalism method of covering these political issues would be to find somebody whose story illustrates the problem, and do a profile of that person. So what you'd have is not a horserace story about the cross-talk between loathsome selfish ideologues shutting down the government on the specious Grover Norquist no-taxes pledge, but, rather, a talk with Grover. A discussion about the tactics one guy uses every day to be powerful enough to single-handedly close down the U.S. government. Grover is the beat, all the rest of those people are ants on his melon. You say Grover doesn't talk to the media? I refer you to the Talese Sinatra story, a masterpiece of how to write a story about somebody who won't talk to you. The other political journalism lesson everyone seems to have forgotten is that the White House news does not exist at the White House.

Newspapers get all caught up in that basically because provincial editors want to be invited to the White House correspondents' dinner and check out Lindsay Lohan's tits. To have One's Own Reporter at the White House is the mark of the publisher's influence on national policy; the reporter is not so secretly viewed as being the publisher's lobbyist, and the game of political journalism in which news coverage is seen both as a prize and a critique, which leads to such remarkable actions as the politician John Edwards' consulting the actor Sean Penn and movie director Paul Haggis on how to spin his bimbo eruption. That essential rats-in-a-bottle perversion of politics was the lesson of Watergate as well, in All the President's Men -- that Washington was Hollywood and Hollywood was Washington.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/features/dcmovies/postinfilm.htm

So, how to cover politics for the 21st century is no secret. The tools have been here for 50 years, whether you call it the New Journalism, Johnny Carson's monologue, or the Jon Stewart effect.

End political journalism as we know it. It is literally destroying our world.

This is a wiki. Please add to it.

1.
how to cover the 21st century. go where the voters are and encourage them to vote. this would include latinos who will apparently be the majority voters soon.

2.
asking people, on their turf, not in polls or in your office in a focus group, what they're worried about. what do they think most about? ie., what are the actual political issues as opposed to frank luntz's and grover norquist's?

Under Cantor's leadership, Norquist's anti-tax pledge was directly responsible for last summer's debt-ceiling standoff that wrecked the nation's credit rating by leading the nation to the brink of default. "Congress was willing to cause severe economic damage to the entire population," marvels Paul O'Neill, Bush's former Treasury secretary, "simply because they were slaves to an idiot's idea of how the world works."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/grover-norquist-the-billionaires-best-friend-20111109#ixzz1uP5JniBB
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/grover-norquist-the-billionaires-best-friend-20111109

3.
bilingual short news for apps. pioneered in Latina mag; even the poorest most homeless person now has a cellphone.

4.
young voters issues. centrist. green. pro-war. anti-abortion. all carry $15K student loan debt. predatory lending.
http://projectvote.org/images/publications/Youth%20Voting/2010_Policy_Paper-Enfranchising_American_Youth.pdf

5.
enviro justice, lack of enforcement, health
http://www.cbf.org/page.aspx?pid=2518 -- scandalous lack of enforcement of pollution laws already on the books

6.
the suburbs -- parking lot, cars, working out of your car as office space is downsized. beltway/cruising/LA car culture; the garlick-fication of the burbs as entry level immigrants avoid inner city, etc. people in cars are limbaugh's audience.

7.
transpo issues, smart growth, retro-fitting transpo and highway systems planned for commuting into the inner city rather than to jobs sited round beltway

8.
taking the political discourse, including abortion as a political issue, away from the republicans. disassembling their 40 year hegemony based on this:


9.
reform campaign spending law and make it clear to the supreme court that citizens united was their last fuckup: people have the votes, no matter how many billionaries spend all their money on lunatics.

10.
the supreme court is accountable to the people and its time is up. there's a moveon/flashmob/kickstart/ aspect to the 24hour news cycle the internet has inaugurated that should be exploited.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/03/impeach-the-supreme-court-justices-if-they-overturn-health-care-law.html

11.
both tina's and ariana's newspapers are consistently in technorati's top 10. what do t and a know that the washington post and the new york times do not? what is the jon stewart effect -- gen x and younger get all their news from jon? pro and con?

12.
what are the cons of mandated (kickstarter/pro publica) flashmob journalism?

Most revolutionary children's book illustrator of the 20th century. New Yorker. Mensch.



Everyone who ever read In the Night Kitchen understood it was a love song to the city, to the democracy of the public space and all the people in it.

Mr. Sendak, sweetheart, your parents always knew you were gay. They're proud of you. They have supper waiting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/books/maurice-sendak-childrens-author-dies-at-83.html