26

I'm So Old. Not.

So I turned 26 last Friday. K., with the combined efforts of B., B., M. and apparently a whole lot of others, managed to a.) fly totally beneath my radar for three weeks, b.) infiltrate my apartment the day of, c.) set up said apartment to look like a casino, and d.) surprise the hell out of me (in a good way; the best way; the 'best birthday ever' kind of way) once I walked in the door after having dinner with my parents. The world's most intense poker game over $7 took place at my living-room table; bottles were dropped on my kitchen floor and more were opened; good things happened in corners.

I also turned another year older without the massive existential angst that came with turning 25. Mostly because, over the last year, I've managed to complete a big chunk of the life goals I hadn't accomplished up to that point. Also because 26 isn't really a milestone; that's reserved for 30, particularly if I haven't published at least one book by then.

The search for an agent is still ongoing, thanks for asking. [growl] The literary world's equivalent of Ari Gold takes the manuscript of 'Q' for four weeks and comes back with, "You're a good writer, and I love the premise, but I'm not passionate enough about this...it's really a subjective thing." The next day I sent off query letters to two more.

By way of suicidal birthday resolutions, I'm upping my running regimen from 6 miles to 8-10, which I'm sure I'll curse myself for as I plow through the riverside muck and cold under a gray sky, before heading back to my place for a cup of unsweetened green tea. Hoo-rah.

Post piece on Friday. Speaking of shameless plugs, another City Paper squib (it's a couple ones down). Also had a short piece on James Bond for the DC Style blog. Speaking of which...

Bond. Angsty Bond

So early last week, I took a spare hour and wrote a spec piece, politically-tinged, on the then-upcoming 'Casino Royale.' Neither Slate nor Salon went for it, of course, because they had their own features in the pipeline, but I'm pasting the first draft below, simply because I hate to see it languish on my Mac's hard drive.

(I enjoyed 'Royale,' when I finally ended up seeing it on Saturday. Craig looks like a Bond actually capable of hurting people, as opposed to a GQ cover boy to whom someone happened to hand a Kalishnikov. If anything, he's far more impulsive and unrefined - at least in this initial film - from the Bournes and Bauers the producers were trying to emulate. But I leave the deeper discussion of that to the below.)

Anyway.


HED: Fractured Ice
DEK: Onscreen spies and our national character.

"Shaken, not stirred," Sean Connery murmured in the first James Bond movies – a phrase that not only described his martini preference, but a sort of general 1960s super-spy aesthetic: unflappable under fire, emotionally cool, utterly assured of the moral superiority of his purpose. His fictional contemporaries often evinced the same kind of righteousness.

But in the past few years, you had to pity Bond a little. While he was off playing with an increasingly ludicrous series of gadgets – invisible cars, satellites that could harness the sun's power – his super-agent descendents have busied themselves with all sorts of moral quandaries. Jason Bourne (of the Bourne soon-to-be trilogy) expresses rigid-jawed regret for his actions; Jack Bauer (of the TV show 24) tortures and kills in the name of Truth, Justice and the American Way, or at least allowing millions of Angelinos to breathe radiation-free air. Villains often turn out to be the same government – or at least a rouge faction of it – that created the hero.

And still Bond continued on his merry way, through a world of clearly delineated good and evil that bore increasingly little resemblance to reality. That is, until now: Casino Royale marks the emergence of a different Bond, as represented by the spooky-looking Daniel Craig: tough, impulsive, violent. More than willing to bring the hurt, and then examine his bloodied soul in a bathroom mirror.

Our onscreen super-spies are now on the same page. But why this page in particular? The spy thriller used to be about escapism: fabulous locations, beautiful women, elegant dining, and a little bit of state-sanctioned violence to cap off the evening, so to speak. Yet Bauer, Bond and Bourne live in gray and unhappy worlds; their actions not only kill villains (still cartoonish) but also the innocent – and often eat away at their own souls.

The times in which we live might have something to do with it. Bond – the old Bond, the one who spoke in Scottish brogue while stopping yet another Soviet-funded missile – personified the West's sense of rectitude during the Cold War. Today, with the upheavals over Iraq, when the majority of Americans cite 'corruption' as their major influence at the polls, well, that old image of the spy seems positively dinosaurian. To look at it one way, our spies end up reflecting how we feel about our government.

Which is all well and good, but why watch in the first place? What appeal do these onscreen agents have for a West that's sick of the actions of their real-life counterparts, including those at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo?

They feel regret. At the end of The Bourne Supremacy, Bourne's final mass-demolition chase through Moscow isn't driven by a need to save the world, but to apologize to the daughter of a couple he killed long ago. Over the course of five seasons of 24, Jack Bauer loses everyone he loves in the course of preserving millions of lives – turning him into a drug addict and, at one point, a quivering mass of nerves. And not to ruin Casino Royale, but there are reasons Bond becomes an emotionally distant borderline-sociopath. They are shaken and stirred – and perhaps give the viewer some catharsis in the bargain.

Which makes Bond films suddenly relevant again, at least as subtext, as "stay the course" gives way to trying to find alternate ways out of our international quagmires. But while Bond can strip off a bloody shirt and have a moment of reflection in a hotel bathroom, and Bauer can have exactly two minutes' worth of nervous breakdown alone in a car, what form will our own collective regret take?

Sighted in the Wild

“Hey, I’ve seen you before.”

I’m standing in a corner of the office elevator, singing the chorus of The Killers’ ‘Uncle Jonny’ under my breath (“Tell us what’s going on/Feels like everything’s wrong/If the future is real/Jonny, you’ve got to heal”), when the man standing in front of the doors turns to me, squints, and says the above.

“Huh?” Momentary panic seizes me. Do I owe this person money? Accidentally bump into him and spill his beer at the Cat last weekend? Am I about to get pummeled? My foggy pre-9 a.m. brain desperately sorts through scenarios…should I launch some sort of preemptive attack here?

“Yeah, you write those restaurant reviews,” he says. “Small plates.”

Ah. Yes. The OnTap restaurant review page, which unfortunately features a headshot of me looking like a chainsaw-brandishing maniac right out of an 80s horror flick – not in any way the fault of the photographer, I hasten to add, but because my natural aversion to having my photo taken often translates itself into a distinctive do-you-feel-lucky-punk grimace whenever a camera is pointed in my general direction.

“Yep!” I say.

Random person nods again and steps off the elevator, leaving me mildly confused. Also present in the elevator: our marketing director, who twists around and says, mildly wide-eyed, “You moonlight?”

Yeah, you could say that.

Bread

In a fit of temporary insanity I decided to make bread over the weekend. It turned out well, actually, for a first attempt. A recipe involving a minimal amount of yeast and a high water/flour ratio, then left to sit, in its covered bowl, for 18 hours. The dough had the consistency of warm glue as I poured it from the bowl into a towel dusted with flour; I poked it into a rough ball and went running (a cold and rainy early Sunday morning, a muck of wet leaves clinging to my shoes and shins), and then came back and baked it on high heat for two hours.

The whole process left me with a faint understanding of why the chefs and butchers in Bill Bufford’s ‘Heat’ constantly refer to their foodstuffs as live things, with their own personalities and fickleness. Bread dough quickly assumes its own destiny – it’ll rise when it feels like it, but maybe not – and depending on which ingredients you use, has its own quirks; just as, I imagine, certain cuts of meat or animals have their own structures and idiosyncrasies that demand the respect from whomever’s doing the cutting. The tragedy of mass-market production, in a way, is that by producing uniform products by the tens of thousands or even millions, all those quirks are stripped away, leaving you with something bland of soul if not of taste.

Oh, great, I’m a friggin’ New Yorker food critic now.

Shameless Plugs

New City Paper piece (City Lights) on Nov. 17; interview with Darren Aronofsky runs in the Washington Post on Nov. 24; Post piece on Internet leagues sometime in Nov.; new issue of OnTap on Nov. 30.