SJB in Busytown

Top ten accomplishments in the last week:

1. Ran 3 miles without the aid of infectious pop tunes on my iPod, instead listening to infectious conversation with SKB.
2. Finished Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (I liked Housekeeping better, but this novel was still good) and started John Irving's Cider House Rules, since I've pretty much forgotten the plot of the movie.
3. Gave these socks to SKB, and started a new knitting project, still top secret:














4. Learned what organza, cap sleeves, boat neck and French bustles are.
5. Watched "16 Candles" for about the 20th time, while still discovering fresh nuances in an old classic.
6. Decided that Dick Button is the singlemost obnoxious, sexist, xenophobic moron ever to provide commentary during Olympic figure skating events.
7. Made these strawberry confections:














8. Went to Seattle. Thought it was cool. Saw my high school buddies. Talked with one who has ditched the Midwestern accent in favor of a Pacific Northwest accent, inexplicably, after only 6 years there.
   
9. Got a job at SF State.
10. Decided not to take the job at SF State, thus making it almost certain that I will be in Berkeley for another year, and be able to provide you with more witty commentary on the academic job search on this blog. Win-win?
    

Curb Your Random Stuff

People put all kinds of wierd stuff on the curb around here, and gleefully watch it disappear. The curb is the place where things magically vanish, as though devoured by some Municipal Monster. Back in 'sconsin, when you had something you wanted to get rid of, you would either wait until Bulk Trash Pickup Day -- a scavanger's holiday -- or you would squirrel it away for use in the annual garage sale, where you could earn a cool nickel off it. In Berkeley, you can always find a steady supply of old printers, microwave ovens, chairs, magazines, kitchen supplies, you name it, on the curb.


Yesterday, I picked up a sweet cache of "Cooks Illustrated" magazines from 2002-2003. Yes! I happened to walk past the bathrobed former owner of these magazines this morning on my walk with the dog, and I thanked him. This kind of behavior is totally outside of curb etiquette: it's an anonymous endeavor, in which throwee and scavanger never come face-to-face, and there's no haggling, since it's implicitly free (although sometimes people put signs on the stuff on the curb that says "Free" just in case there was any doubt).

Things I have picked up off the curb:

• wicker basket
• Office Depot file boxes
• tennis balls (for Addison's habit)
  

Things I have gotten rid of curbside:

• record player (gone in under an hour)
  
• large poster frame (carted away by kid on skateboard within 10 minutes)
• broken tape deck (24 hours, although I almost divested myself of it after responding to a Craigslist ad -- "Wanted: broken tape deck")
  

The Rain in Spain... oh, enough already

OK, I promise I'll return to non-Spain-related topics soon, but I just have to gripe about something. Why do American journalists insist on rehashing the same old tired refrains when they write anything that even remotely has to do with Spain?

Example A
Washington Post article kindly forwarded to me by dl004d: "Gains in Spain"
This article is about cutting-edge Spanish architecture, so why must it belabor an old saying that no one uses anymore? Do people ever say "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain?" Do we really need that much help pronouncing our "ai" words? It's time to retire all the variations on this one.

Example B
New York Times article: "Investors Are Tilting Toward Windmills"
OK, this one doesn't bother me quite as much because it doesn't have anything to do with Spain, and it deals with some of Bush's "sounds good when read off the teleprompter" ideas about renewable energy. Still, there are other things that happen in Don Quijote that could be mined for metaphors. It's a long book.

Example C
The last paragraph in this old article on Flakmag: "The fame in Spain falls mainly on the plane..."
I mean, who comes up with this stuff? Oh wait. I wrote that one. Anyway, my point is that it's time to lay the overused Spanish refrains to an eternal sleep. They're not cute anymore, and I'm the first to admit it.

Facha in San Francisco

Whew -- a long day at San Francisco State is behind me. In fact, that's the last of my on-campus interviews for now, so I'm breathing a sigh of relief. Now for the post-mortem:

First of all, these classes are huge. I was expecting 20 students, tops, and there were about 35 in the culture course and probably 45 in the language course. All very engaged, though, which was really nice. I started the culture course giving a stripped-down, 10 minute timeline of 20th Century Spain: Civil War, Franco dictatorship, Franco's death, transition to democracy. Censorship and state-sponsored control of politics, culture, civil rights, etc. under Franco. Newfound artistic liberties, political upheaval and wild hedonistic indulgence during the Transition. Great. Everyone's with me so far. I toss out a discussion question: "How do you imagine artists would react to Franco's death and the artistic freedom they sudden aquired?"

A woman raises her hand. "Well, actually, things were better under Franco. The streets were empty. There wasn't any crime, or drugs. There was poverty, but there was also an upper class, and there wasn't any middle class. When Franco died, people just went crazy." In Spain, we call people like this "fachas:" Franquists who wish the clock would turn back so all the dirty, dangerous, democracy-loving wierdos would just go back into the caves they were forced to ride out the dictatorship in so they wouldn't be executed. Fachas are fairly commonplace in Spain, but they're an indangered species in San Francisco. Where did this woman come from? My knee-jerk reaction was to tell her to save it for whatever masonic ritual she has after hours, but instead I was civil. I told her I was trying to boil 50 years of Spanish history into 50 minutes, so obviously I was polarizing the issues, and that, yes, the Transition was more complicated than a dictator dropping dead and women immediately taking their tops off on the streets of Madrid.

The rest of the class was successful, I would say. I chickened out a little with the Almodóvar clip, and stopped the tape just before things got really raunchy (when I had mentioned to the professor who regularly teaches this course that it was a "racy" movie, he broke out in a nervous sweat, so I decided to tone the clip down from R to PG-13). But the class still got the point I was trying to make, clearly enjoying the Spanish punk music and the transsexual Alaska, one of a host of Spanish fringe actors named after remote and funny-sounding states (see also: "El Gran Wyoming").

And, I found out later, that my little facha visitor is in fact from Spain, and she causes the professor headaches by airing her "When I was in Spain, everyone loved the Inquisition" rants on a daily basis. One of the other professors on the hiring committee insinutated that he would have just thrown her out of class, so I guess I handled her pretty well, after all.

Happy Chocolate Day!

As promised: chocolate cake. Well, actually, brownies. But I've made these in a round pan, frosted them, stuck candles in them and called them a cake. I don't feel restricted by labels. As long as it's got chocolate in it. I got this recipe from Alton Brown's "Good Eats" cooking show on the Food Network. For those scoring at home: I pay for "cable," but the only fun channel I get is the Food Network.* These are easy and mighty tasty.

Cocoa Brownies

4 large eggs
1 1/4 cups cocoa(use the good stuff)
1 c. sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 c. brown sugar
1/2 c. flour
8 oz. (2 sticks) melted butter
1/2 t. salt (kosher, or not)

Beat eggs, add sugars and butter. Beat in cocoa. Add vanilla, flour and salt. Line 9x9 inch pan with parchment paper (if you think you're all that) or butter bottom and sides of pan. Bake for 45 minutes (longer if you like 'em cakey; shorter if you like 'em gooey) at 325 degrees. Enjoy.

*A typical conversation regarding my cable services:
Friend: "You get cable, right?"
Me: "Yeah, but only so I can get reception and NBC."
Friend: "So didja see 'The Daily Show' last night?"
Me: "I don't get Comedy Central."
Friend: "But you saw 'Project Runway,' right?"
Me: "I don't get Bravo."
Friend: "Well, at least you can watch blizzard coverage!"
Me: "Nope. I don't get the Weather Channel or CNN."
Friend: "What kinda crappy cable do you get, anyway??"
Me: "They call it 'Before They Invented the Wheel Basic.' I can see naked quadriplegics on Berkeley public access, though." [Ed. No joke.] [Ed. Wish it were, though.]
End.

SJB, Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas de Berkeley

On Wednesday, I have an all-day interview at San Francisco State, where I'll be teaching two classes for the assembled masses. One of these classes is a "Culture and Civilization of Spain"-type deal, and I agreed to rip the students straight out of the Golden Age and into wild, frenzied, sexy Transition Spain (1975-1982).

To that end, I'll start by teaching an excerpt of Martín Gaite's El cuarto de atrás (1978), which is pretty standard college reading with a partially historical view of Francisco Franco's death and the way Spanish culture and society changed thereafter. It's also in my dissertation, which is a bonus.

But, to wake the students up after all this tedious novel-reading, I thought I would show them a snippet of Pedro Almodóvar's first movie, made before he was the toast of Spain's film export business, back when he was still working for the phone company: "Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón" (1980). Alrighty, then. I dipped into Berkeley's vast video archive this afternoon to watch the flick and find a 5-minute representative sample of a 'non-historical' reaction to Franco's death and the aforementioned frenzy of liberty and intellectual freedom that followed.

Well, Almodóvar's first movie does not contain the, ahem, "conservative" fare you might find in "Todo sobre mi madre," or "La mala educación." No, no: "Pepi, Luci, Bom..." is more akin to early John Waters, replete with snot-eating, a knitting and peeing party (that's the only way to describe it), plenty of S&M and a very memorable scene in which Almodóvar measures the manhood, shall we say, of a number of willing contestants. There's not a 5-minute block in this movie that wouldn't somehow offend the sensibilities of, say, me, much less a group of college students. And it's always fun to preview a movie like this at the library, so that everyone can see that you're watching a movie with full-frontal nudity at 1:30 p.m. on a Monday. Luckily, though, I found a brief scene that merely describes a number of these 'questionable' actions -- set to high-velocity early-80s Spanish punk music, no less -- instead of portraying them directly. These are fine lines we walk.

My hope is that the SF State students will all be from San Francisco and not Kansas, where I can only imagine what sorts of lawsuits would be brought against a lowly job candidate who shows an S&M romp to undergrads in the name of "culture." But the bottom line is that "Pepi, Luci, Bom..." really does show the destape (literally translated: taking the lid off; figuratively: whatever goes, baby) in 1980s Madrid as a reaction to 40 years of censorship under an oppressive dictatorship. It's a movie that clearly pits old Spain (straight men in positions of authority) versus new Spain (lesbians, transsexuals, punk rockers, snot-eaters and frisky women), and new Spain is obviously more fun.

So, we'll see what happens when I show my clip on Wednesday. I really hope some dottering 80-year-old emeritus professor doesn't show up to critique my teaching skills, but if he does, maybe he'll learn a thing or two, ¿no?

But I went to Prom!

Yesterday I was talking to someone about our dorkiest high school moments. His, that he eagerly passed on the Prom in order to work on a group physics project that involved an elaborate time-saving device designed to drop a quarter into a piggybank, yes, seems very dorky. I countered with the fact that I, as yearbook editor, inserted either my name or my imagine into our senior class yearbook in excess of 40 times. We both agreed that this example was more egocentric than dorky. But it's still bothering me: I was a dork in high school, but how to prove it? I have since come up with some more traditionally dorky moments.

Perhaps a vote is in order?

Which of SJB's high school moments is the dorkiest? Running for (and winning) Vice President of Band. Wearing all black to school to mourn the passing of "Cheers." Writing (and reciting) a poem in honor of my 9th grade History teacher that included the verse "He flings his arms out like a tree."

Let the Blogging Begin!

Well, it seems only appropriate that as soon as my new, decisive and paid-for wireless connection kicked in, I should jump on the blog bandwagon. Going from a dial-up to wireless seems like trading in bloomers for cargo pants, although I can't say I'm a big fan of cargo pants. More to the point, 2006 is a year of milestones for me (sure, you know about one of them, smarty pants, but there could be a few more that just might surprise you. Film at 11.), so why not record a few of them?


Anyway, look for The SJB's thoughts on everything from knitting to recipes for molten chocolate cakes to the trials and travails of Addison to what electronic gadgets the Cal undergrads have hanging from their well-coiffed heads when I see them in the gym to updates on the thrilling life of a grad student in California and much, much more on my blog. My only aim is to amuse and enlighten, and of course there's the whole self-indulgence thing, too.

Please comment at will.*


*Comments regarding spelling and grammatical errors will be duly noted and disregarded.