Political Seafood: What's Real in District 9

Attention: Contains spoilers.

District 9 is well worth seeing. It may look sensationalist and sci-fi (it does star prawnish aliens slumming it up in a militarized Johannesburg) but it contains enough realistic elements to keep the plot current, and often scary, in the way that catastrophic news is scary, subverting our everyday ease with the knowledge that well being is ephemeral.

The basic story takes place 20 years after an alien ship has broken down in the sky above Johannesburg. Well intentioned humans have retrieved the ill and starving aliens and established them in filthy refugee camps that are eerily reminiscent of both the post-Katrina FEMA trailer parks and the real slums of Johannesburg. As the aliens grow despondent in the face of unemployment, racism, interment in refugee camps, and permanent estrangement from home, they begin to act out, sometimes committing acts of violence against humans. As you can guess, the South African populace and government respond to the aliens' behavior with that particular blend of militarism, ownership and fear of the unknown that is the trademark of the modern nation state. When the movie begins, the alien affairs branch of the government (MNU) has decided to issue eviction notices to the alien inhabitants of District 9 and move them all 250 kilometers outside of the city.

If you know a little about the history of apartheid then you will get this reference to the independent homelands that the white South African government set up as a means of sequestering, denationalizing and controlling black South Africans. Like the alien homeland being established in District 9, these homelands were policed; likewise, both homelands devolved into crime-ridden ghettos full of angry people. The sociopolitical disaster that was apartheid evolved into a protracted and violent struggle for black independence, but it is not this struggle that the movie copies as the plot progresses. Instead, the movie seems to follow the more recent violence in South African slums between black South Africans and illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe. In the past year Zimbabweans and other aliens have been murdered and burned out of their homes by furious citizens afraid that the immigrants are taking the few jobs available in South Africa's weak economy.

This intra-slum violence is referenced in the relationship that District 9 explores between the aliens and a Nigerian gang squatting in District 9 in order to supply the aliens with desired goods (cat food, for some reason) and acquire alien weaponry (which no human can actually use). The Nigerian boss also engages witch doctors, who tell him that murdering and eating the flesh of the aliens will allow him to acquire their strength, intelligence, and ability to use their advanced technology. Ritual amputations and murders like this do still occur in parts of Africa today, and the movie makes a strong visual statement about the barbarity and idiocy of such "magic."


Alien rebellion is mentioned in the film, but the true focus is on the fears and actualization of miscegenation, and on the ways in which we tend to underestimate the abilities of people when we don't speak their language or understand their culture. The film highlights the political tactic of impoverishing people in order to disenfranchise them; its images of aliens corralled into fenced compounds resonate because there are people in South Africa and elsewhere who really live this way. I referenced Hurricane Katrina earlier; what violence and hopelessness are we engendering by treating our own citizens like aliens, too antithetical to the American dream to touch?


It's impressive that District 9, a mock-umentary that indulges in human-alien sex humor, sight gags, and stereotypical characterizations of shady, sadistic government agencies and brutish soldiers, manages to be simultaneously hard-hitting and entertaining. While the government and military characters are painted with broad strokes, the main characters--Wikus, a clumsy MNU officer, and the ironically named Christopher Johnson, alien genius--are given pathos and greater dimensionality. Wikus's horror at turning into an alien and his growing, grudging respect for Christopher, while well-trodden movie fodder, are sincere and engaging. And Christopher defies alien film convention by eschewing violence; if anything, Christopher's technical genius and self-appointed savior role mark him as the movie's hero.

District 9 doesn't do anything new as a blockbuster sci-fi film, but it's the first high budget fantasy I've seen that acts so simply as an allegory for contemporary political and humanitarian issues without being polemical or contrived. The viewer isn't lectured to by the film's focus on human inhumanity; rather, she is implicated in it, and forced to watch what we do to ourselves and our own.

And we wonder why extraterrestrial life won't come to Earth.

Bon Le Weekend

It's been a day of labor, grading and housework, but now I'm listening to Ella and Miles Davis and relaxing as the mingled scents of basil, mint and roasted tomato swell in my apartment, mixing with the cooling evening breeze.

It's a beautiful night.

I had quite a lot of leftover sundried tomato pesto from the other night, and all day recipe possibilities have been percolating in the back of my mind. I finally decided upon a roasted tomato tart with wilted radiccio and kalamata olives, resting on a liberal layer of pesto and nestled into a whole wheat olive oil crust. I'm serving the tart alongside a roasted patty pan squash and herbed chickpea salad (basil, chives and mint) in a lemony dressing. I'm finishing the tart with a balsamic reduction to add just a trace of sweet verve.

I am so excited for T to come home to this pretty, pretty meal, and I don't care how Donna Reed that is.

My culinary life has changed since discovering Chocolate and Zucchini, which I know is already very popular, but oh my goodness I was late to the table. Clotilde is responsible for the tart crust and is the inspiration for the squash salad. I was persuing her recipe index and can't wait to try a variation on her lentil apple salad (I might make mine more Indian than French inspired, because I have red lentils and Nigella seeds) and the zucchini and mushroom crumble (to do away with the green club our friend Yael thrust upon us the other weekend--her squash plants are palaeozaic--and the sad creminis languishing in the fridge). I must admit that I also love the blog because "Clothilde" is my pseudonymous title of choice when I have to write staff recs for really embarrassing books, and I take a lot of delight in its mixture of Flaubertian bourgeois exoticism and mothball old-ladyness. Chocolate's Clotilde is no doddering old lady, but she's a devastatingly good cook.

But oh, T is home and it is time to eat.

Bonsoir.

The Ramona St Keep

One day I will own and operate a little restaurant that isn't much more than a cozy hole in the wall. The tables and chairs--maybe 8 tables total--will all be rustic and mismatched, as will the tableware and glasses. I'll buy the stuff at rich lady rummage sales and I'll call my restaurant the Ramona St Keep in honor of our town's own Beverly Cleary, and here is what I'll serve.

In the mornings I'll make buttery yellow eggs served with seasonal vegetables, sweet roasted roots in the winter, crisp poached asparagus in spring, heirloom tomatoes and corn and patty-pan squash with bacon in the summer. Eggs come with biscuits some days, some days rich Irish soda bread, studded with fennel seeds or dried currants. For people who don't eat eggs I'll offer one or two alternatives, like an ever-changing breakfast panino--figs, parma ham and goat cheese one day, spinach, garlic and feta the next--and house-made granola with Greek yogurt. Strong coffee. Strong tea that comes to the table in a pot. Maybe on Sundays a wicked Bloody Mary. In a pitcher.

Lunch will be a stream-lined affair, with one daily soup and 2-3 blue plate specials. I'll cook what's on the market and according to whimsy, but it will be lovely comfort food. Creamy roasted tomato soup with my own special red chili grilled cheese, zucchini-corn cakes, curried chicken salad stuffed into hot naan, lemon risotto topped with butter-laced crabmeat. Warm bread twists folded with salt crystals and garlic.

No suppers. I like to spend evenings cooking for my family.

I think the trick will be to keep it simple. Find a rotating menu that I can make sublimely and stick to it. (Experiment at home only.) Get cute waitstaff. And have a little place, so that I don't get too stressed out. And make arrangements with local farmers to get fresh everything.

I'm really serious about this. In the last two years of thwarted ambition and career hell, with the resultant malaise of mediocrity settling over me, I have only genuinely enjoyed a few things. And cooking for other people is one of them. And I've found myself growing unaccountably jealous of the Portlanders I see, not older than me, running their own foodie businesses and seeming, well, happier than I am. And I think to myself, why the f**k am I lugging boxes around for management I despise when I could be at home elbow-deep in flour? And so, I need a plan to get myself elbow-deep in flour and happiness.

I'm going to start taking some cooking classes to bone up on skills I have but need to improve upon, like shaping artisan bread and cooking for a large number of people. (Can you even take a class on that?) I want to start making my own chutneys and pickles, too, and I'll need to start ferreting some money away. I'll also need to read up on running a successful small business.

But--unless life gets in the way, which it does do--this is my new 10-year plan.

At 38, I will own a thriving little business that smells like cinnamon and carmelized onions and pays more than my crap job at the warehouse.

You'll come, won't you?

It looks like two pigs fighting under a blanket

I need to watch every movie starring Olympia Dukakis.

I just watched Steel Magnolias for the first time since childhood. First of all, it stars Dolly Parton and I love her, big hair, face lift, boob job and all. And then, my husband's away at the coast, and Steel Magnolias is the sort of film you only ever watch when your husband is away at the coast and there's only the cats to see you cry buckets when Sally Field finally breaks down. The really surprising performance is by Daryl Hannah, who is hilarious in her various manifestations as nervous wallflower, reformed party girl and evangelical Christian. I didn't know she had comic chops like that! What an underrated performer.

But lest you think that I have lulled myself into a Thai takeout chick flick stupor, I'll have you know that I've been mulling over a very deep question for the last two days.

Does knowledge carry moral weight?

No, I'm not stoned. Seriously: is knowledge morally relative; for example, does that fact that NASA recruited Nazi scientists (aka war criminals) to get us to the moon before the Russians somehow devalue the achievement? Should we have left humanity's feet firmly on earth rather than use our least heavenly brothers to reach celestial heights?

This is a good question, I think, especially given the recent and well-publicized prosecution of John Demjanjuk, an 89-year old alleged concentration camp guard now being held in Germany on murder charges. I'm of two minds about this situation. On the one hand, if he's guilty then he should spend the rest of his life in jail. He's lucky to have lived a happy, safe life after denying the same to thousands of innocent victims and it's time to pay the Piper. On the other hand, what's the point? At 89 he's probably repressed or rationalized his involvement in the Holocaust. Either he feels remorse or he does not, but packing his wrinkly butt in prison will only inspire self-pity and put the burden for his care on the German tax payer. Besides, it's hypocritical of the US to aid in the prosecution of octogenarians 50 years after recruiting their colleagues for the air and space program. Are these arrests the result of residual guilt? A tacit acknowledgement of the failure of the space program to establish whatever world stability and happy American hegemony the original Cold War ideologues thought it would?

Thank you for your time and energies, Herr Nazi. You bad boy, you.

I'm sure that the Nazis' contributions to academia weren't limited to rocket science. What about Mengele's medical experiments, how have they impacted modern medicine? Are we morally obligated to eschew this material; or, are we morally obligated to embrace this material as a means for saving future lives? What about Mercedes Benz and Volkswagen's and Doc Martins? Are ideas and items eternally innocent? And, a related question, when does responsibility for the Holocaust end? Will we hunt and prosecute every last member of the 3rd Reich so that we can people the German jails with incontinent Aryans and wipe from our consciences the shame of sending boats of refugees back to Germany?

...

I try not to dwell on the Holocaust. My application essay for the seminary (yes, I have a graduate degree in modern Jewish history...so how is it that I have just learned about NASA?!) was about relinquishing our hold on a traumatic past that does nothing to strengthen modern commitment to Jewish community and culture. I care very deeply about not defining Judaism by what has been done to Jews. Yet, learning that our trip to the moon was the end result of Nazi experimentation, and enslavement, and the careful erasure of war records, tarnishes an act I've always idealized a bit. And this idealization has been aided by an American educational policy to not teach students about the Cold War and to interpret all technological progress as inherently good and ethically neutral. When you separate "one small step for man" from the USA's and the USSR's petty rat race for universal domination it is an amazing triumph. Looked at within its socio-political context, Armstrong's moonwalk was a colossal pissing contest between two countries desperate to do anything besides examine their own moral failings.


So how did I get from Steel Magnolias to Wernher von Braun? It would trivialize both to reduce each to a lesson about life and death, or the impact of independent decisions on a community. Is science like art, heavy with history and continual meaning? Should it be studied for its nuances, for its dalliances with the emotive--something we try very hard to excise from our laboratories and science funding?

Surely yes?

Two Ham Sandwiches

Some days call for nostalgia, even of tastes or sounds we did not experience in their original era. I find that books do this to me all the time; I want to sit at the dinner table with the characters and break their bread, because the author makes those kitchens smell so good.

So it was that I found myself craving a kitschy ham and cheese sandwich with a thin layer of real mayo on white bread all day today. Store-bought bread, too, the kind that tugs at the roof of your mouth tasting like mayonaise and sugar. I'm reading a novel set in the early 1960s, and the children are constantly devouring platters of sandwiches put out by adoring mothers in twin sets and pumps. Several days of such descriptions, and my stomach was growling for Cold War culinary Americana. My reading, combined with my growing disgust with the low-carb, low-everything-that-tastes-good skin diet, made this desire too strong to combat. After work I walked to the store and purchased sliced Virginia ham, sharp cheddar cheese, and Franz buttermilk bread. I came home and put together my white, orange and pink sandwich. I cut it into two triangles.

It looked like elementary school, like childhood. Not my childhood, because we ate crumbly whole grain bread with tuna fish and minced black olives, but the childhood you read about in novels that take place on Canadian air force bases in 1963. Campbell's tomato soup childhoods.

It was so good. I ate my sandwich in the early evening sunshine with a glass of OJ, and then had some cherries. And a couple of hours later, I ate another sandwich, curled up reading on the couch. (I understand now why storybook children eat multiple sandwiches. They're not very filling--probably because they're not very nutricious. I'm already hungry again. And only the grimmest self-restraint is preventing me from going right back to the fridge to make myself an old-fashioned PB&J.)

I know I shouldn't eat like this every day, and tomorrow I have a gourmet meal planned because my parents are coming over (Mussels Marseillaise, baguette, salad, poached peaches) but once in a blue moon you gotta get your Kraft on.

Tybalt

What's little, polydactyl and black all over?

Tybalt, of course! Our new kitten, companion cat to the ferocious Stella (who likes this not at all).

We'd noticed for some time now that Stella gets very anxious when we leave for the weekend, often so anxious that she stops eating and begins vomiting all over our clean laundry. The vet suggested that we get a companion cat for her, but we hestitated, because Stella isn't exactly friendly with other cats. In fact, she's the street bully and enjoys spending her days tormenting the neighbor's dogs. She's sweet and beautiful with us, but she also bites and hisses when she doesn't get her way, and she doesn't adapt well to new individuals.

So.

Knowing all of this, we decided to get a second cat anyway. The lure of a new furry beast was too strong to resist. T's the household animal expert and he's confident that Stella will eventually stop hissing and lunging at Tylbalt; I hope she'll stop making those unearthly Gollum noises while she eats, keeping one violent eye trained on the kitten. In the mean time T and I are relegated to separate bedrooms so that each kitty gets a human and Tybalt doesn't cry all night. Stella has been shirking our company, preferring to make lots of noise under the bed to ensure an unrestful night's sleep and remind us of our perfidy.

Tybalt. The most ill-fitting name for such a merry, prancing kitten! He's joyful and sweet, sleek and black, with the mouth and ears of a Siamese. He talks constantly, which is a little irritating at times (for example, 5am), but he's so loveable and soft that the mewing is more funny than annoying. He likes to meow fiercely at me while I wash dishes. I look down and there at my feet is a tiny little kitten roaring like a miniature lion. Right now he's sleeping against my knee, with one many-toed paw thrown over my leg. How could anyone resist such sweetness?

We think he'll stay sweet, too, because at his age Stella was already a little huntress. She would lurk in corners and doorways for the sheer pleasure of climbing up your bare leg or back, her kitten talons needle sharp. She was completely adorable, but a little scary, too. To me, at least, since I was her favorite victim (T thinks she liked the shrieking).

I look forward to the day when the kitties reconcile. In the mean time, though, we just drink in his cuteness. And give Stella some extra, sympathetic snuggles.

A Post in Need of a Plot

Oy gevalt I've been so busy, you wouldn't believe so busy. Tonight alone I had a rehearsal, went grocery shopping, cooked for the camping trip, consolidated my lesson materials for photocopying tomorrow morning, and began finalizing my plans for Kate's bridal shower. Now I'm waiting for the chickpeas to cool so that I can finish the hummus, shower, and get to sleep.

I have made some tasty treats for camping. In addition to the ubiquitous meats for grilling (in our case turkey maple sausage and burgers) we have watermelon, a brown rice salad with julienned cucumbers, red bell pepper, and napa cabbage in a spicy peanut sauce, and homemade hummus. We also have fresh corn, yams, and russets for slow roasting in tin-foil, Kettle Chips, and rice flour tortillas. I figure if we're going to car camp, we might as well do so deliciously. T is promising a meal out in Manzanita, too, which is very dashing and romantic. In this household, anyway.

I've also been planning my cousin's bridal shower brunch, which is going to be full of all sorts of delicious foods that I shouldn't be and haven't been eating, and so will enjoy with greater gusto than usual. There's going to be a fresh fruit salad with mint, roasted potatoes with sea salt and rosemary, a strata with rustic bread, gruyere and ham, wild rice salad with sundried tomatoes and goat cheese dressing, baked blueberry French toast, scones, cake, mimosas and rose! And lots of silly games and present opening.

This is my first stint as matron of honor, and I'm taking it very seriously.