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  1. F@#$ yeah, internet.

    March 23, 2011 by ms. xandra

    During the past ten minutes, I have been having a really good time with Fuck Yeah, Nouns.  Are you familliar with this exciting new Internet Activity?  Ok, go familiarize yourself.

    And…we’re back.  So, in an attempt to test how cultured the Fuck Yeah, Nouns engine is, I have attempted to search for each of the Ninja Turtles, to see whether inputting their names as my nouns would result in pictures of Ninja Turtles or pictures of artwork.

    Fuck yeah, Donatello gives us a picture of Donatello’s David.

    Fuck yeah, Raphael gives us a picture of Raphael’s School of Athens.

    Fuck yeah, Michaelangelo gives us some Sistine Chapel detail.

    Fuck yeah, Leonardo gives us a really unflattering picture of Leonardo DiCaprio.

    WELL DONE INTERNET, YOU NEVER LET ME DOWN.

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  2. Misc.

    February 13, 2011 by ms. xandra

    1.  For my birthday Aaron signed me up for neon school.  Seriously.  As in, starting at the end of March, I am taking an eight week long course on how to make your own neon sign.  I will learn such skills as bending tubes of glass using flames, wiring high-voltage transformers, and mixing different gases to make colors!  Will I blow something up? Most likely.  Will I have an amazing time making a giant neon tyrannosaurus rex?  ABSOLUTELY.  Is Aaron kind of amazing?  Um…yeah.

    2.  Dan Savage said something that was supposed to be funny, but instead was fatphobic and offensive!  But luckily this smart lady called him out, and managed to be intelligent AND ACTUALLY funny.  See?  It can be done!

    3.  We are doing a sex shop series for Valentines over at blogging.la, so you should go contribute some sexy haikus to my sexy haiku post, because my sexy haikus aren’t very funny because it’s late and I’ve had too much wine to be writing sexy haikus.

    4.  I would like for Sidney Poitier to come over and read me bedtime stories.  Because this is sadly unfeasible, I have instead added every film he has ever made to my Netflix queue.  This means that in about a month, when all the Sidney Poitier dvds start coming in, I will be all like “why did I order so much Sidney Poitier?”  Something similar is happening right now, only with bad Italian horror movies, because about a month ago I remembered that I like Mario Bava.  And that’s why tomorrow I will be watching something unfortunate called “Kill, Baby, Kill!” when really I would like to watch “In the Heat of the Night.”

    5.  I love this picture of Frances Farmer that I found on the LA times website.  This was photo editing before the days of the Magical Picture-Fixing Robot Box (ie: computer), friends.  This was photo editing with markers:

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  3. How good have I been at blogging more often? ANSWER: Terrible.

    January 17, 2011 by ms. xandra

    But oh well.  Tomorrow I am having the first ever Dinner with Mrs. Given.  I will not reveal what the menu will include, but rest assured that it will be visually stunning, at least, and possibly tasty?  No, it will totally be tasty.  Pimiento cheese will be prominently featured!  And cherries!  But not in the same dish, I promise.  I am deliberately only making tasty things from the Meta Given cookbook and avoiding the entire “variety meats” chapter, given that “variety meats” seems to be a coy euphemism for horrifying organs that nobody wants to eat, and includes a recipe for something that is actually called “Brains a la Newburg.”

    Also, look at this cuteness:

    Those are Franklin and Baskerville, my furry monster babies, whom we have named after typefaces.  One of them is currently sitting beside me and is having a hard time assimilating the fact that CORN CHIPS ARE NOT FOR KITTIES THEY ARE FOR ALEXANDRA.  The other one is being aloof because he has decided that today, he is afraid of the living room.  They are awesome.  You will probably be seeing more of them, as I need to do my part to ensure that the internet remains 99.9% pictures of cats.

    And I leave you with some words of wisdom from the Patron Saint of Mid-Century Cuisine, Mrs. Meta Given herself, who will certainly be smiling upon me tomorrow:

    “Almost any hors d’oeuvres or canape can be made larger and served as the first course at the table.  When served this way, it is usually eaten with a fork.”

    I interpret this as a beyond-the-grave endorsement of my giant deviled ostrich egg, and also an invitation to host a dinner party at which I serve each guest a giant, plate-sized pinwheel sandwich (cream cheese/gherkin variety).

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  4. Look! I remembered this post I wrote about Westminster Abbey five days ago!

    September 13, 2010 by ms. xandra

    Oh what a day, what a day! What an excellent day!

    I am really trying to pack it in while I’m here. Mostly, my days look like this: I get up, I have breakfast (you get to pick six items from the buffet – but what counts as an item is hilariously inconsistent. 1 item = bowl of cereal with milk. 1 item = piece of cheese. 1 item = slice of salami.  1 item = 2 hash browns [thus making it possible to go up to the buffet and order 12 hash browns, please, which I have yet to try] BEST ITEM = Pain au chocolat. Another consequence of the 6 items rule is that my hoarding instinct kicks in and I get down to the breakfast room and I’m like “MUST GET SIX ITEMS” regardless of how hungry I actually am. So, while at home, breakfast would probably be yogurt, granola, maybe a banana, here breakfast ends up being yogurt, granola, banana, apple, pain au chocolat, bacon. And so I never end up eating all of this, but I hate wasting things so I bring them upstairs to my room “for later,” and have thus begun curating an ever-expanding collection of increasingly wrinkly apples on my desk), and then after eating my six things, it’s off to the library we go, where I either listen to a few hours worth of oral histories, or I dig around in British music magazines from the 60s, where I have discovered FASCINATING THINGS, like, apparently the British thought the Temptations were a girl group until they actually came to the UK in 1965? I have seen them referred to thusly in two different reviews. Also, Beatles coverage is wonderfully Ringo-centric, which makes sense, because, as much as I joke about Ringo being the best Beatle, he actually was the most popular one and got the most fan mail. Ringo Starr quote of the day, from a 1965 article about his recent marriage, and he mentions that his wife can’t cook: “But I can cook corn flakes!”

    Anyhow, it is pretty easy to get completely sucked into all of this and turn into a hermit woman unless I set myself a time limit (which is necessary for sanity) and so around 1-2pm I usually leave the library and spend the afternoon adventuring, and today I had the best adventure of all!

    I went to Westminster Abbey, even though I had decided that I wasn’t going to go to Westminster Abbey because it costs a resentment-inducing fifteen quid. But then! I read about the Westminster Abbey Undercroft Museum, which is very small, and contains an exhibit of funereal effigies. So, statues and wax figures of dead monarchs that were made to have, like, standing around at the funeral service and afterwards. Which is weird. Really, really weird. But awesome. So I went and saw the funereal effigies of various monarchs, and then I went and saw their real tombs, because they are all there, in the Abbey, just kind of scattered around in no particular order whatsoever, stacked on top of each other and in the walls and in the floor and, let me tell you, TLC needs to do an episode of Hoarders there. Can you imagine it? TLC host: “Why do you have all of these tombs?” British Monarchy: “Look, I just really like tombs, ok?”   TLC:  “I think you are collecting these tombs to distact you from your own emotionally bereft existence.”   So I got to be in the proximity of the mortal remains of Richard the 2nd and Edward the 3rd and Elizabeth the 1st and her estranged sister Mary, who is, perversely, buried in the same casket as she is with an inscription to the effect of “divided in life by ideology, but together FOREVER IN DEATH!!!!” but with less caps lock and exclamation marks.

    There are also various famous people in the Abbey, so I got to see the resting place of my old pal George Handel, the only classical composer other than Liszt who I can still stand after surviving a Bachelor of Music degree. And Chaucer’s there, and Dickens, even though Dickens didn’t want to be buried there because it’s such a ridiculously pompous institution of the monarchy and the establishment. But apparently Queen Victoria wanted him there, and thus he is there because she was Queen Victoria.

    There are also all of these little memorials to people who aren’t actually buried there but who make the British Empire look good. The MOST WONDERFUL ONE OF ALL, was Noel Coward’s, which read “Noel Coward, something something about him being witty (I paraphrase), BURIED IN JAMAICA.” Good for you, Noel Coward.   Of course you’re buried in Jamaica.   I’d wanna be buried in Jamaica, too. I hope you’re buried in Jamaica, pickled in rum.

    The biggest difference I’ve found between churches over here (ie: Europe, UK) and back home is that the churches back home aren’t actually full of dead people. Here, they are. They’re in the floor. And they’re in the walls. And (in Catholic churches, mostly) sometimes there a little bits of dead person on display (this one church in Antwerp had a scalp of St. Something or other. And this other church had a weird cabinet full of tiny glass windows, and when you got close, it turned out that behind each tiny glass window was, like, a bone scraping or a hair or a tooth from dozens of different saints). I like to remind myself of this when I’m walking around these places, because I find it so novel and interesting. “Right now the walls around you are full of peoples’ BONES!” “All of these tourists are walking on top of DEAD WEALTHY 15th CENTURY LORDS!” I say these things to myself, in part to see if I can freak myself out, but also because I’m weirdly captivated by this closeness with death that we don’t seem to have anymore. I feel like people used to die in much more vivid, frequent ways than they currently do in the Western world, and now we treat death with kid gloves. But the Abbey was such a weird monument to the dead, and you’re literally surrounded by them, so I find it impossible to just think of it as a site of religious devotion, because it’s much more a site of weird, fetishistic and extravagant acts of remembrance on the part of the ostentatiously wealthy. I wonder what the queen thinks about when she goes to Westminster Abbey. She was crowned there, and generations of her ancestors are buried there, and (I don’t know if she’ll be buried there, because I don’t know that they bury people there anymore but) I’m sure they’ll have her funeral there. Maybe she just tries not to think about it.

    And so then, I went to another church (St. Martin in the Field) and had lunch in the crypt! Like you do. But this one was less creepy because it wasn’t full of gaudy tombery and bits of it have been converted into gallery space and it’s been modernized in lovely ways, and so as I sat in the crypt eating my bread and butter pudding and drinking my Victorian lemonade, I imagined what it must have been like when people hid down there during the blitz! Because they must’ve. I also think about that every time I take the tube. The London Underground is far more deep, and closed-in and rabbit warreny than any subway system I’ve ever used so even just tromping through it can be pretty evocative.

    Anyhow, lunch in the crypt was great, and then I walked to Buckhingham Palace to visit my head of state and passed the Canadian High Commision on the way, which, dissapointingly, didn’t have a Tim Hortons in it because I was envisioning a fabulous scene in which I bought a cup of shitty coffee and enlisted a dapper British lad to take a picture of me drinking it in Trafalgar Square in front of Nelson’s column, because that would have been SO FUNNY, don’t pretend it wouldn’t have been.

    And then I bought a pair of sensible shoes because I completely wore through the sensible shoes I brought for walking around in and they’ve been starting to give me a back ache. And EVERYBODY here has these fantastic little oxfords! And so obviously I had to get fantastic little oxfords so that I can be as chic as a Londoner.

    I also need to tell you about: the Dennis Severs House, which was amazing and lovely, but difficult to put into words; Maison Bertaux, which was also amazing and lovely; and umbrella stores.

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  5. Exceptionally wise things I have heard British children say:

    September 11, 2010 by ms. xandra

    On life goals:  “Mummy, if I become a really, really, really good ballerina, I’ll be able to leap over the River Thames!”

    At the Tate Modern, on the merits of contemporary art:  “Grandma, why do you like these things?”

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  6. Adventures across the space-time continuum

    August 3, 2010 by ms. xandra

    Ok, so I started writing this late last night and got as far as uploading the picutres before I realized how past my bedtime it was.  I am now no longer flying to London tomorrow:  I am flying to London today!  I am currently in LAX, bogarting wifi from Air France, which is very very slow because I am obviously not actually in the Air France first class lounge.  However, this is a major improvement over what normally happens when I’m stuck in this airport for hours which is this:  I turn on my computer hoping that there has been a miraculous miracle and that LAX has free wifi all of a sudden (because charging for wifi at an airport should probably be illegal).  Instead, it is like, $7, which I totally resent, and so I try to steal wifi from somewhere, which usually results in me being able to connect to the Air New Zealand wifi but not actually use it because they give all of their customers a secret code and are mean and don’t share.  But today, some of the stars are aligned correctly, or something, so god bless Air France for their unsecured network.

    Anyhow, things are not as wonderful as they could be because there is NOT A SINGLE COPY OF VANITY FAIR ANYWHERE IN TERMINAL 2.  Vanity Fair is the only magazine I ever want to read on an airplane:  it has just enough actual, good, politically-oriented journalism and just enough complete and utter fluff (ie:  celebrities and dresses) to be perfect airplane fodder.  The New Yorker has too many words, Vogue has too much Anna Wintour, Vanity Fair manages to hit the happy medium between them (unless there’s a Christopher Hitchens column, but even then, there’s nothing quite like feeling some righteous anger regarding an idiotic blowhard who should never have been given any sort of media mouthpiece).  But not today, alas.

    ANYHOW!  Back to last night we go!

    …

    Presently:  I’m feeling rather future-oriented.  Tomorrow I fly to London!  What happens there will shape the future of…my dissertation.

    Pastly:  I cleaned out my camera’s memory cards and found all kinds of photos of past adventures, presented here for your enjoyment and edification, after the jump!

    (more…)

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  7. Everything’s in boxes

    July 15, 2010 by ms. xandra

    A lot is going on!  Big changes are afoot and many adventures are in the air.

    First of all, something that would have seemed so highly improbably mere months ago has happened:  I have moved in with a gentleman.  I know, right?  But it is wonderful and good.  I am currently living off of his good graces in his apartment on the West side (part of operation Pay As Little Rent As Possible This Summer) and in the fall we will be moving back Eastwards to a West Hollywood apartment built for two.  Well, built for four, actually:  it will house myself, my Gentleman Caller, his Gentleman Hound Dog (Boomer Thaddeus Dog, Esq., World’s First Canine Lawyer), and a CAT that I am going to get and the cat will be grey and cute and named either Otto or Rock Hudson.  And as for my Gentleman Caller, well, suffice it to say that he makes me a pretty happy lady, and takes me on wonderful adventures and makes me tasty sandwiches.  Also, he is currently sitting behind me geeking out over an old synthesizer someone gave him to play with and it is totally cute.

    PLEASE NOTE that this does not change the fact that I am, and will always be a spinster, and spinsterly in my ways and doings.  I recently conferred with one of my sisters in spinsterliness and explained that, despite how happy Gentleman Caller makes me, I had been having a very fraught, angst-ridden identity crisis over the nature of my spinsterliness.  But Good Spinster Amy reminded me that, indeed, men may come and (hopefully not) go, but Spinterhood is Forever.  And since being angst-ridden is really our defining characteristic, what was I worried about anyhow?  And so now I begin this new weird life as a cohabitating spinster, with slightly less angst about that particular issue, but plenty of angst about most other things.

    Also, one of the sad things about this move is that my dear, dear now-former roommate, Sam, has left for New York for a year, and I miss him.  The glory days of 1027 North Laurel Ave have now come to an end.  But also this gives me an excuse to go to New York sometime.

    Other important things have happened recently, namely:  I have done the greatest thing that I will ever do.  No, no, I did not start and write my dissertation in a month.  No, I did not end world hunger.  Instead, I had a poem about crullers written in the style of William Blake published in the Los Angeles Times.  Because remember how I ran that Donut Summit for LA Metblogs (now totally sleekly redesigned and relaunched as blogging.LA)?  Well, the whole event was nothing short of miraculous and wonderful.   And the next day, when I saw that my cruller poem, written late one night when I needed to think of something funny to post on the blog, was in the LA Times, I laughed and laughed and laughed.  ”All of our hopes and dreams for you have come true,” said my father.  Well, all of my hopes and dreams for myself have come true, too.  I can probably just go ahead and retire now that I am a published poet.

    Giant fantastic things are coming up in the next few weeks, too:  I’m off to the UK for my first venture into actually doing research for my dissertation.  I’ll be traveling in the North for a couple of weeks, then meeting up with Gentleman Caller for a couple of weeks of vacationing in Belgium and the Netherlands.  And then I’m going back to London for a month of research at the British Library.  And TANYA IS COMING TO VISIT ME THERE AND WE ARE GOING TO KIDNAP HUGH GRANT!  Actually, probably we won’t kidnap Hugh Grant, probably we’ll just go laugh inappropriately at the art in the Tate Modern, and maybe see a soccer game.

    UNTIL THEN, my life is consumed by teaching the history of rock and roll to a group of people who ask me questions like “what is that electronic sound effect they use on Neil Young’s voice in that song.”  The technical term for that sound effect would, of course be “Just Neil Young’s Voice.”  Oh, the undergraduates!  Sometimes endearing, always entertaining.

    Also, Gentleman Caller and I went on a desert adventure that I am going to post about in a minute.  And also this weekend is dinosaur day so I will post about that in another minute!

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  8. Really good business ideas that will make me Lady Millionaire, Ph.D.

    May 14, 2010 by ms. xandra

    Because we all know that my only career prospects outside of academia are in entrepreneurship, I have thought of these foolproof business ideas that will make me millions of dollars.  Because it is 1 in the morning I just tried to spell “foolproof” with a ph at the beginning and had to stare at it for a while until I could figure out what was wrong.

    1.  Voicemail from a Monkey.  We’ve talked about this before.  The way this works is you give me a million dollars and then I have a monkey leave voicemail at the phone number of your choice.  Makes a great birthday gift!

    2.  Your Name on/in Beets:  I write your name in Sharpie on a beet.  The beet is placed in a jar, which is hung from a cord, which you wear as a necklace.  ALTERNATELY, I spell your name in sliced beets.  On a  plate.  Comes with a side salad for $1 extra.

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  9. “You smell nice” “I washed my hair for you”

    April 2, 2010 by ms. xandra

    Dear Ladies, Unicorns, and others,

    Gosh!  I just realized that I’ve been a jerk and forgot to write all about how that Cherpumple turned out!  I’m a terrible scientist, it’s true.  So, um, yeah, it wound up looking something like this:

    So, one thing that I hadn’t bargained on is that my oven is terrible.  It is bad.  It heats unevenly, it is too small, it is all kinds of ungood things.  Because of this, we ran into a small problem with the batter not cooking all the way through.  In and of itself, this is not a huge issue, as god knows gooey cake is good cake.  The problem is that the uncooked batter added a lot of weight to each individual cake layer.  So once they were stacked on top of one another, an event of geological proportions took place, and we all stood around in awe as the Cherpumple collapsed upon itself.

    Don’t fool yourself into thinking that means we didn’t eat it.  Obviously we ate it.  I had to serve it with a ladle, but dammit, we ate that cake.

    We ate that cake so hard.

    I’ve been working too hard these days.  I think it’s becoming a problem.  I remember a time, long ago, when it was the weekend and that meant that I didn’t have to do any work.  Now I’m at a point where I am literally on a two-day-workweek schedule – I only have to go to campus Tuesdays, for seminar, and Wednesdays, to teach – but my resultant five day weekend is really more like five days of neverending busywork with not much to show for it.  This seems somehow unfair because I worked really hard to get to the point where I could have five day weekends, didn’t I?  The point was that I’d be able to spend them doing things, like, I don’t know, actually doing things that don’t involve sitting at a computer developing repetitive strain injuries.  I’ve also gotten really bad at feeding myself.  I get home from school and I’m like, oh, I’ll just work on this lesson plan for a half hour and then eat dinner, and suddenly it’s 12:30 at night and I’m eating a tuna sandwich.

    I’m also having an identity crisis because I’m teaching the first class that I’ve designed myself, and my personal politics (of the feminist, pinko, commie variety) are front and center, and I feel like I constantly need to justify those politics, for some reason.  Like, I know why it’s important to teach this class about 1960s girl culture.  But I feel that no matter how many times and how many different ways I explain that it’s important, my students are all sitting there thinking “you’re just talking about this stuff because you’re a man-hating feminist and also you don’t know anything about real music, like the White Album or Pet Sounds, or whatever whiny white boy rock we’re deifying today.”  So I have these really great moments where I’m like, “hey, think about it, The Beatles were basically the Jonas Brothers in 1964, so maybe we should stop hatin’ on the tweens?” (only more eloquently, and also with the internal logic of that statement explained) and they seem to get it, but then I go home and I’m filled with self-doubt and I feel like I need to start the next class by explaining that just because this semester we’re learning about things that teenage girls liked doesn’t mean that boys haven’t also made worthwhile contributions to society.  Which is stupid because the entire university is about boys’ contributions to society, but it’s just so normalized and invisible.

    But at least somewhere, in the world, there are layer cakes with pies in them.  Also, I want a kitten.

    The title of this post is an actual exchange that takes place between Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue in “A Summer Place.” God bless 1959.

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  10. Someone give this lady a cookie.

    March 4, 2010 by ms. xandra

    This quarter could end just about now, as far as I’m concerned.

    I did my exams!  Writing my exams was seriously the best week of my entire life.  Imagine, if you will, being given seven days in which you do not have to go anywhere nor talk to anyone whom you do not wish to; imagine that during those seven days your task is to write and write and write about the things that you love the most in the world; imagine that during this time people just bring you food so you don’t actually have to cook anything; imagine that it is really the way you would live your life, given the opportunity.  Basically, it was so good.  My exam questions were great and made me feel really happy about my dissertation committee, and I got to write about Dusty Springfield and Lady Gaga in the same essay.

    So, the transition back to real life has been weird and stupid, mostly.  Mostly I resent all the dumb crap I have to do even more than I did before, and I’m so stressed out that my entire body hurts, and all I want to do is finalize the goddamn reading list for my class next quarter, but do you think I have time for that?  Of course I don’t have time for that.  ALSO, I am mad at the post office because apparently my mailing address has become a black hole into which things that are mailed to me (ie:  Valentine’s presents special ordered for Gentlemen Callers, polka-dotted vintage dresses from Etsy, birthday cheques from Grandmothers) disappear, never to be seen from again, which is obnoxious and stupid.

    On the bright side, this movie arrived in the mail today (I had it sent to me at school, where mail still works, despite the budget cuts), and, when I finally have time to sit down and watch it (ie: when my dissertation is finished) I’m sure it will be the best night of my life because it is the Lost Skeleton of spy thrillers:

    Oh, I feel better knowing that I’ve blogged.  I’ve been feeling majorly angsty about not blogging lately.  What a weird thing to feel angsty about!  Could I be addicted to the internet?  Oh, heavens no.

    THINGS THAT ARE GOOD THAT I AM LOOKING FORWARD TO:

    Friday night quality time with best friends Mulder and Scully;

    We are going to San Diego over spring break and I get to go see panda bears at the zoo;

    Making Out!  Let’s hear it for making out with a nice beardy boy on a regular basis;

    Gin martinis!  These exist, thank the lord.

    Oh, also, THINGS THAT WERE GREAT THAT HAPPENED EARLIER THIS WEEK:

    Met Marilyn Wann!  Super duper fat activist who invented the muumuu of the month club and is thus a true heroine, if ever there was one;

    Ok, fine, I’m going to bed now.

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