My blog and welcome to it

You've heard the boos from Cannes and the "what the--?s" from reviewers. Even many of those who are well disposed toward writer-director Richard Kelly, some of those who liked--maybe loved--Donnie Darko, have given up on this movie. Well, I liked it.

Tonight Zach and I saw a preview screening of the version that's now slated for wide release. The audience seemed pretty polarized. Judging by the walkouts, some hated it. Judging by the people who stayed in their seats through the credits, talking passionately, some loved it. I didn't love it, but I liked it quite a lot, and I enjoyed watching it, which means something kind of different. A lot of little things were extremely funny, and some scenes were just delicious to look at. And it was fun seeing people like Jon Lovitz and Christopher Lambert in utterly unexpected little roles. The sound track is awesome, in a Mobylicious way, and there's a bizarre scene set to one of my favorite songs--"All These Things That I Have Done" by the Killers--that would alone have been worth the price of admission, if we had paid one. Overall, it's a weird and perhaps over-ambitious mishmash, but it's not stupid, and I wasn't bored.

And there aren't enough movies about the space-time continuum, anyway.

Oh, and I came to the film with no backstory. I haven't read the Southland Tales graphic novels, but now I'm going to give them a look.

Xerxes has become something of a pet among the nurses and technicians at our vet clinic, due to his all-too-frequent visits and his tractable, good-natured behavior. The other day he had his teeth cleaned. I dropped him off in the morning, and when I came to pick him up in the afternoon he was sporting gleaming teeth and also this dapper neckerchief, with which the nurses had decorated him:



This isn't a very lively picture--he was still dozy from the anesthetic and just napped on the floor all evening--but it's the only one I've got of him in the scarf where he isn't moving. He doesn't seem to mind the neckwear, which we've put it on him for an hour or so several times since then. He is, of course, wearing it today. Maybe he just likes the fact that we keep telling him how adorable he is, and playing with him, but by now he knows he doesn't need a scarf for that. He has got us utterly whipped.

Happy Halloween to all four-legged, two-legged, and no-legged friends.

I'm crunched for time on a deadline right now, but it's been a while since I posted, so I'll take the lazy way out and post someone else's clever stuff.

This piece on "How to Write a Book" was forwarded to me by my eagle-eyed and all-knowing pal Magda, from www.yankeepotroast.org, a site that bills itself as "The Journal of Literary Satire: Hastily Written and Slopilly [sic] Edited."

1. Do absolutely nothing until you can see the whites of your deadline’s eyes.
2. If you’ve got cowriters, try to disagree as much as possible. If you’re of the same opinion regarding a section of text, bicker about dinner choices.
3. Criticize what little progress you’ve achieved and doubt what little talent you possess.
4. Do not write any new words when there are still old words that have only been rewritten twelve times. No sentence is complete until it’s lost all traces of your original thought.
5. Complain about the pressure of a looming deadline to everyone you know. This will ameliorate the jealousy and bitterness felt by friends without book deals. It will also put an end to social invitations that may hamper your writing progress, as your former friends will now hate you.
6. Stop sleeping. Complain about how tired you are too.
7. Never have a mental breakdown before 11 p.m.
8. Do not postpone other projects so that you can focus on the current one. It’s better to spread yourself so thin that you produce an evenly distributed amount of complete crap.
9. If you’ve gotten this far without a single technical foul-up, now’s a good time to download something viral.
10. Make a schedule for yourself, but do not even remotely follow it. Instead, continually do some mental math that divides your remaining pages by the rapidly dwindling number of hours.
11. The best writing is that which is compiled from dozens of different documents, including things you’ve e-mailed or text-messaged to yourself. Try to create separate documents on as many different computers as are available. Some things will be irrevocably lost, and hours will be spent cursing. Learn a lesson about orderliness, but do not act upon such knowledge.
12. Some terribly constructed sentences always make good low-hanging fruit for your cowriters to edit, thus protecting your awful idea from their meddling.
13. Were you napping? Stop that. It’s 11 o’clock already. Start freaking out, hard.
14. If you’ve worked hard three days in a row, take a hard-earned day off. And it looks like snow tomorrow, so you might as well take the whole weekend. But a day off from writing is not a day off from complaining!
15. If you haven’t drastically gained or lost weight, you’re just not writing well.
16. Assume your sources are reputable. When some accidental research reveals the source that serves as foundation for your work to be as reliable as grandma’s memory, briefly consider the amount of work it will take to correct things at this late hour, then fuck it and move on.
17. Pick up any book on your bookshelf, skim a few pages, and admit that it’s a terrible book… but better than anything you’ll ever write. Cry.
18. If one of your cowriters is something of an optimist, shit in his hat.
19. If you’re not panicking, call your agent and request they he or she panics. You’ll have no problem panicking afterward.
20. Call your mom.
21. Your time is more valuable than your money. Spend as much cash as you’ve got in your pockets.

Yep. That's about right.

I ate a few of those Purple Corts tonight and was not impressed. On the bright side, I wasn't killed, either. Yet.

First I dry-sauteed the two small ones. This is a method I often use for cooking fresh-picked mushrooms, as they contain plenty of moisture on their own. Dry-sauteeing lets you taste the mushroom itself without any butter, oil, shallots, wine, or whatever else you might use when sauteeing mushrooms. In the case of the Purple Corts, this was not a big advantage. Their texture was pleasing, as was their rich black color (I could imagine using them in pasta dishes for contrast), but they did not have a lot of taste, and what they did have was on the bitter side.

Unable to leave well enough alone, I sauteed one of the bigger ones with a little butter, a splash of wine, and just a hint of garlic--a clove swiped around the pan. The result was a moist mushroom that tasted like ever-so-slightly bitter butter and garlic. Made a beautiful presentation, but I did not even finish it.  I'm going to dry the rest of them and see if they will work in a soup later on.

I now feel rather bad about having picked them all, but I won't do so again. And I have read some things online from people who like eating them, so it was worth trying.

Chanterelles tomorrow! Now there I'm on familiar fungal territory.

No, this isn't about Zach's and my visit to Amsterdam a couple of years ago. Though that was fun.

Yesterday afternoon my friend Kathleen and I went mushrooming on Larch Mountain in the Gorge. Our haul of chanterelles was disappointingly small: those are mine on the right. But we found a bunch of the most beautiful mushrooms I have ever seen. They look black in the photo, but they are really a deep, dark, velvety purple.



They are Cortinarius violaceus, the Violet Cortinarius, also called the Purple Cort. According to several mycological guides I've checked,  they are the only member of their large family that it is safe to eat. It is unsettling, though, when a mushroom is labeled "Edible, with Caution." All of the other cortinarius mushrooms, apparently, contain bad substances called cortinarins. The onset of the deleterious effects is delayed, such that you don't know you have a problem until 3 to 14 days have passed. Still, the identifying characteristics of the Purple Cort are pretty conclusive.

Kathleen and I have never collected these mushrooms, because we have always had much better luck with chanterelles and have concentrated on them. This year we had to branch out. She got a lot of angelwings, and I got these satanic-looking beauties.

The Purple Corts are said to be not particularly savory. They are also said to darken to black when cooked. I propose to start with those two small ones and see what happens. But aren't they gorgeous?