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fatehbaz · 3 years ago

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It is spring in Houston, which means that each day the temperature rises and so does the humidity. The dampness has darkened the flower bed, and from the black mulch has emerged what looks like a pile of snotty scrambled eggs [...]. I recognize this curious specimen as the aethalial state of Fuligo septica, more commonly known as “dog vomit slime mold.” Despite its name, it’s not actually a mold -- not any type of fungus at all -- but rather a myxomycete (pronounced MIX-oh-my-seat), a small, understudied class of creatures that occasionally appear in yards and gardens as strange, Technicolor blobs. Like fungi, myxomycetes begin their lives as spores, but when a myxomycete spore germinates and cracks open, a microscopic amoeba slithers out. [...] When the amoeba encounters another amoeba with whom it is genetically compatible, the two fuse, joining chromosomes and nuclei [...], growing ever larger, until at the end of its life, it transforms into an aethalia, a “fruiting body” that might be spongelike in some species, or like a hardened calcium deposit in others, or, as with Stemonitis axifera, grows into hundreds of delicate rust-colored stalks. [...]

These creatures exist on every continent and almost everywhere people have looked for them: from Antarctica, where Calomyxa metallica forms iridescent beads, to the Sonoran Desert, where Didymium eremophilum clings to the skeletons of decaying saguaro cacti [...]. Throughout their lives, myxomycetes only ever exist as a single cell, inside which the cytoplasm always flows -- out to its extremities, back to the center. When it encounters something it likes, such as oatmeal, the cytoplasm pulsates more quickly. If it finds something it dislikes, like salt, quinine, bright light, cold, or caffeine, it pulsates more slowly [...]. It can solve mazes in pursuit of a single oat flake, and later, can recall the path it took to reach it. [...]

How do you classify a creature such as this?

In the ninth century, Chinese scholar Twang Ching-Shih referred to a pale yellow substance that grows in damp, shady conditions as kwei hi, literally “demon droppings.” In European folklore, slime mold is depicted as the work of witches, trolls, and demons -- a curse sent from a neighbor to spoil the butter and milk. In Carl Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum -- a book that aspires to list every species of plant known at the time (nearly seven thousand by the 1753 edition) -- he names only seven species of slime molds. Among those seven we recognize Fuligo in the species he calls Mucor septicus (“rotting mucus”), which he classifies, incorrectly, as a type of fungus. [...]

These “ladders” or “scales of ascent,” in turn, inspired the “Great Chain of Being” -- the [...] worldview central to European thought from the end of the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages, that ordered all of creation from lowest to highest [...]. Over time, Linnaeus revised his classifications of Homo sapiens, naming “varieties” that at first corresponded to what he saw as the four geographic corners of the planet, but which became hierarchical, assigned different intellectual and moral value based on phenotypes and physical attributes. The idea that humans could and should be ordered -- that some were superior to others, that this superiority had a physical as well as social component -- was deeply embedded in many previous schema. But Linnaeus’s taxonomy, unlike the systems that came before, gave these prejudices the appearance of objectivity, of being backed by scientific proof. When Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, it was on the foundation of this “science,” which had taught white Europeans to reject the idea of evolution unless it crowned them in glory.

But the history of taxonomic classification has always been about establishing hierarchy [...].

I did not learn until college about a taxonomic category that superseded kingdom, proposed in the 1970s by biologists Carl Woese and George Fox and based on genetic sequencing, that divided life into three domains: Bacteria, Eukarya, and Archaea, a recently discovered single-celled organism that has survived in geysers and swamps and hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean for billions of years.

Perhaps a limit of our so-called intelligence is that we cannot fathom ourselves in the context of time at this scale, and that so many of us fail, so consistently, to marvel at any lives but our own. [...]

A few years ago, near a rural village in Myanmar, miners came across a piece of amber containing a fossilized Stemonitis slime mold dating from the mid-Cretaceous period. Scientists were thrilled by the discovery, because few slime mold fossils exist, and noted that the 100-million-year-old Stemonitis looks indistinguishable from the one oozing around forests today. [...]

One special ability of slime molds that supports this possibility is their capacity for cryptobiosis: the process of exchanging all the water in one’s body for sugars, allowing a creature to enter a kind of stasis for weeks, months, years, centuries, perhaps even for millennia. [...] The only other species who have this ability are the so-called “living fossils” such as tardigrades and Notostraca (commonly known as water bears and tadpole shrimp, respectively). [...]

In laboratory environments, researchers have cut Physarum polycephalum into pieces and found that it can fuse back together within two minutes. Or, each piece can go off and live separate lives, learn new things, and return later to fuse together, and in the fusing, each individual can teach the other what it knows, and can learn from it in return.

Though, in truth, “individual” is not the right word to use here, because “individuality” [...] doesn’t apply to the slime mold worldview. A single cell might look to us like a coherent whole, but that cell can divide itself into countless spores, creating countless possible cycles of amoeba to plasmodium to aethalia, which in turn will divide and repeat the cycle again. It can choose to “fruit” or not, to reproduce sexually or asexually or not at all, challenging every traditional concept of “species,” the most basic and fundamental unit of our flawed and imprecise understanding of the biological world. As a consequence, we have no way of knowing whether slime molds, as a broad class of beings, are stable or whether climate change threatens their survival, as it does our own. Without a way to count their population as a species, we can’t measure whether they are endangered or thriving. Should individuals that produce similar fruiting bodies be considered a species? What if two separate slime molds do not mate but share genetic material?

The very idea of separateness seems antithetical to slime mold existence. It has so much to teach us.

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Headline and all text published by: Lacy M. Johnson. “What Slime Knows.” Orion Magazine. August 2021. Photos by Alison Pollack and published alongside article.

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bbclesmis · 6 years ago

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Salon: Watching PBS's "Les Misérables" as Notre Dame burned: A lesson in processing spectacular loss

The new version of Victor Hugo's tale has no familiar tunes to sweeten its tragedy. That feels very fitting now

By way of processing the shock of watching Notre Dame burn in Paris on Monday, I turned away from social media, where livestreams of the spreading flames were sadly plentiful, and turned on the latest adaptation of “Les Misérables,” currently airing on PBS’s “Masterpiece.”

This was mainly out of obligation, to be honest. The six-part series aired its first episode Sunday, the same night as the debut of a certain show starring zombies, dragons and queens. It is currently streaming online and via video on demand. Scheduling new installments of the “Masterpiece” epic as time-slot competition to the most popular show on the planet is pure folly; then again, something has to air at 9 p.m. Sundays. If you can’t serve up the flashiest show on television, might as well come in second.

Except this “Les Misérables” trades in substance, not dazzle. It has no music to it — literally. No renditions of the Broadway musical’s most familiar ditties such as “Master of the House,” no “On My Own.”

Andrew Davies’ adaption of Victor Hugo’s literary hulk (my softcover edition is 1,232 pages long) relies on the beholder to drink in the bitter imagery and soften her heart to the plight of characters who often cannot outrun their past failings regardless of what they do.

And although Hugo’s other great work, the 1831 novel “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” has a direct influence on the history of Notre Dame — Tuesday it soared the top of Amazon France’s n the bestseller list on Amazon France — the spirit of this new “Les Misérables” is better suited the age in which we collectively bore witness to a conflagration consuming one of the world’s great monuments.

On social media the chorus could not quite find true harmony in our collective mourning. People shared photos taken from recent visits and musings as to what Notre Dame means to them; others stonily called out the Catholic Church’s various sins over the centuries, citing everything from its participation in and funding of the brutality of colonialism to its protection of sexual abusers. Still others scoffed at what they saw as another example of manufactured grief showcases by way of Twitter.

The voices became a dueling chorus between the Fantines and Jean Valjeans of the world and the Javerts, to look at it another way. In that respect, the PBS version of “Les Misérables” needs no melodies to sell it, because the sorrow and the harsh lawful judgment demonstrated throughout the story, as well as the grace radiating through its performances — with Dominic West as Valjean, Lily Collins’ Fantine and David Oyelowo’s Javert — are its songs.

Presenting the story as an abridged version of Hugo’s writing forces the viewer to absorb the misery its characters endure without the sugar of melodic performance, without distracting spectacle that allows us, in a way, to emotionally split from the horror of what we're seeing.

And his makes it a diametric contrast to "Game of Thrones," a pure act of spectacle and escapism. HBO’s epic is pure fantasy, even though it too has a historical basis, borrowing aspects of the plot from England’s War of the Roses.

But by incorporating mythical elements and magical forces, the series’ fans can emotionally detach somewhat from the tale’s tragedy. In no way am I suggesting that certain Monday mornings in the upcoming weeks won’t be bluer than usual as the show’s fans come to grips with the death of a beloved character or three in the previous night’s episode. But we can also count on such demises being rendered in ways fitting to how the character lived. Each will be a spectacle among spectacles.

This is what struck me as I watched a place to which I’ve made several pilgrimages over the years be devoured by an element as careless, cruel and unreasonable as flame. I abandoned my Catholicism years ago for the reasons the vocal critics who showed up on Monday listed, as well as much more personal ones. And yet I have laid some of the most significant prayers of my life at the stone feet of Joan of Arc; I have knelt in prayer at her chapel inside the landmark in honor of my deceased loved ones and the troubled living I hold dear. To see the spire fall felt like a conduit to the divine being broken, even though I can’t remember the last time I went to church on Sunday.

But for a portion of witnesses, at least some of those voicing their opinions on the Internet, bearing witness to the public destruction of a world landmark prized in part because it is a work of spectacle on a grand scale became a struggle between the desire to feel and remember, and an insistence on emotional remove, a mode of thought that insists, as we watch this grand wonder crumble in faraway France, that this is not about us, whoever “us” may be, and it's certainly not about you as an individual.

The second episode in the series, airing Sunday, shows the tale’s tritagonist Fantine at her lowest point: she’s cut off all of her hair and sold it, along with her front teeth, in exchange for a measly sum of money to send to the Thenardiers, a pair of cruel grifters with whom she’s left her daughter. She’s already been fired from the factory where she found work. Left with nothing else to offer, and no other place of employment willing to take her, she’s turned to selling herself off piece by piece: first, her most prominent assets, then her body.

The sight of Collins’ Fantine in this version of “Les Misérables” brings to mind the word most appropriate to the novel’s title: at her lowest point, she looks wretched.

Unlike Anne Hathaway, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Fantine in the 2012 theatrical version, Collins’s Fantine wears the gaps in her dental work like a badge of shame. The darkness in her mouth yawns wide at the viewer as she grimaces through physically and emotionally torturous encounters, particularly at the pivotal moment that a certain gentleman crosses her path.

The man is carousing and laughing with the other ladies of the evening, all in much better shape that Collins’ tragic heroine. And when he encounters her, he treats her like a joke. Asking for her rate, she responds, softly, with the offer of however much he thinks she is worth.

“How about… nothing, then?” he counters, roaring along with his friends. Fantine is too weak to offer much of a defense, only a plea for mercy.

“I have to live, monsieur,” she softly says, adding. “Same as you.”

The “gentleman” laughs in her face. “Same as me? Cheeky cow.”

In the musical version of “Les Misérables” this exchange is preceded by Fantine’s climactic solo “I Dreamed a Dream,” the kind of song that transfixes the audience, making it impossible to look away.

This is the song that made Susan Boyle famous, in case you may have forgotten. Back then Boyle’s looks were as frequently discussed as her angelic voice, after she found fame by way of a 2009 episode of “Britain’s Got Talent.” Would she have achieved international stardom if she hadn’t chosen that particular song? It is an anthem of human tragedy, one of the most beautiful created in modern times. And it romanced Boyle, a woman in her late 40s who had never been kissed, never gotten a chance to take center stage, into an international symbol of triumph.

Point being, we’re all made to be the same creatures under the sky, but not on the same playing field unless someone wills it to be so.

Central to “Les Misérables,” which was first published in 1862, are the various trials of Valjean, actual and spiritual, some imposed on him by Javert, the law enforcement officer obsessed with bringing him to justice for a petty crime for which he was never caught and tried. West and Oyelowo are outstanding individually and in the few tense scenes they share, because they each grapple uniquely with the concept of righteousness. Oyelowo’s assured severity evokes the weight of the law and righteousness as defined by man, which serves as Javert’s north star.

West on the other hand digs into the agony of Valjean’s ongoing spiritual conflict, as he’s constantly torn between doing the right thing by man’s law and following the way of divine justice. His life is a perilous tightrope walk between these poles, particularly when it comes to making amends for his failings by raising and caring for Fantine’s orphan Cosette (Ellie Bamber).

And there’s a comfort in engaging with “Les Misérables” denuded of the songbook that made Hugo’s 19th century story popular again among the late 20th century’s masses, particularly as we come to terms with what’s been lost in the fires that nearly destroyed a place many thought would stand forever.

The spire of Notre Dame has been replaced before; it fell in 1786. It has survived eons of natural deterioration and assaults at the hands of men, notably during the ages of Napoleon and French Revolution, two eras surrounding the main action in “Les Misérables.”

“The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and Hugo’s tragic story of the cathedral’s bell-ringer Quasimodo and his unrequited love for a gypsy named Esmeralda so thoroughly seduced 19th century Parisians that they were moved to campaign for the crumbling church’s restoration, an effort that spanned decades, continuing even up to the day of the fire. If American Francophiles revisit the tale via the page or the various films it inspired in the coming days, no one should be surprised.

But I also hope that as part of that reconnection to history, more people balance the all-encompassing passion for “Game of Thrones” by also taking time to appreciate Davies’ latest take on Hugo’s other tale. “Hunchback” is a story set in Notre Dame, but “Les Misérables” captures the soft clash of emotions resulting from our insistent lamentation over its loss. It is a story that captures the essence of humanity and redemption, appropriate accompaniment for a great work of humankind revived time and again over the centuries, out of an urgent need to redeem what is best in us. That has been the case throughout many centuries, and it holds true even today.

https://www.salon.com/2019/04/17/watching-pbss-stoic-les-miserables-as-notre-dame-burned-a-lesson-in-processing-spectacular-loss/

#les mis bbc #bbc les mis #reviews #articles #salon #notre dame de paris #pbs

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4626songs · 7 years ago

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Everyone deserves a great love story. This one is mine.

So. Here’s the thing.

Is it even appropriate for a 38-year-old guy to obsess over a major studio teenage rom-com flick? People my age who saw it usually say they wish they had something like that when they were that age – like, 20 years ago? I probably should behave like a proper adult, too: just love the movie and wish I had it back then when I was seventeen.

The problem is that after watching the movie and reading the original book, I feel seventeen once again. In all the right and wrong ways.

The case in point: Love, Simon.

I mean, yes. I’m done keeping my story straight.

When it comes to the emotional intellect – i.e., empathy and ability to recognize others’ as well as my own emotions – I am a certified piece of dumb and voiceless deadwood. I mean, I even officially have it in my DNA. But it also did not help that I grew up with emotionally detached parents and had very few friends during childhood. I’ve been struggling with the lack of emotional intellect all my life.

But when I hit adolescence and started to feel something big, it was the worst. I could not recognize and understand what the fuck was going on. And definitely I could not talk about it with anyone. Not even because I was scared. Simply because I literally did not have the words to describe it.

Eventually, it was music, movies and, ahem, slash fanfics that helped me find those right words that explained me to me. That big thing was me being helplessly and hopelessly in love with my best friend.

Curiously, I did not have any struggles with my sexuality or identity after this revelation. I sort of accepted me being gay as a matter of fact and moved on.

Telling anyone – and especially my best friend – about this was a completely different matter. Obviously, I was scared. As Simon says in the movie, announcing who you are to the world is pretty terrifying. But it was not just this fear. Once again, I did not have the words to tell my story. My go to sources of emotional cognition – music, movies and books – were failing me. You know, there was not a lot of coming-out, coming-of-age films or songs or books quarter of a century ago. Except maybe for Smalltown Boy. The most beautiful song. But do you remember the video? One more reason to be terrified and NOT come out.

So, I was silent. It also did not help that I knew for sure from our conversations that if I told my friend about me being gay and my feelings for him, pretty much everything good in my life would end.

I was correct. After suffering for several long years feeling increasingly cold inside from not being able to speak up and express what I feel, I finally managed to confess to him somehow. And yes, it went almost as bad as I expected. I was told that I was a misguided fool, and that I should never speak up about it again. Never speak up.

See. My first coming out experience was pretty bad. But not something objectively bad. I was not beaten up or bullied or outed, thank god. That was out of question, I knew him too well for that. But still. Somehow I was left even more dead and frozen on the inside than I was before. Not something to look for in the future.

But eventually, things got better. I found new funny and geeky hobbies, through which I met great new friends-for-life. I got three university degrees, including a PhD, and became a scientist. I started a music blog, and eventually freelanced as a music journalist. Finally being able to talk about what music meant for me was a liberation.

On a personal front, things were also moving somewhere somehow. There were other unrequited loves. Deeply engaging epistolary relationships with anonymous penpals. (Hi, Blue!) Casual sex. Proper offline boyfriends, and even serious long-term relationships. Some drama along the way, of course. But, until recently, no great love stories coming along with that. Somehow, deep inside, I ached for a great love story to happen in my life.

And then there were those other coming outs. Nothing objectively bad. Always insanely awkward. When I told my mother, she said that I had an irrevocable right to ruin my life and do whatever I want, and we hadn’t talked about me being gay for the next twelve years. A roommate did not believe I was gay at first, and then, when I insisted that I was not joking, he cussed and stopped talking to me for two weeks. A girl who had a crush on me laughed with relief that there’s something wrong with me and not her as I didn’t return her feelings. But there were other friends, who accepted me unconditionally, sometimes even without fully understanding what I was talking about and what it meant for me. I am so grateful to them. But in the end, it was not enough for me to shake that feeling of permanent awkwardness and fear of being me. I chose to remain in the closet for the rest of the world.

But you know what’s (not really) funny? That the same happened with all other important things in my life. It’s like I was permanently living in a giant ball of awkwardness. I had to keep mostly silent about my geeky hobbies at my wonderful science job, even though these hobbies were the main source of my creativity and inspiration. In turn, my wonderful geek friends could not care less about my music tastes. My music friends kind of respected me as a science guy, but I could never talk with them about actual science. And beneath all of that was this big-ass gay secret. It’s like I was living at least four parallel lives, but never a complete one.

I guess once you decide to remain in the closet about one thing, you cannot fully be yourself about other stuff. I became so used to self-editing. Self-censorship. Strategic omissions. And, worst of all, being mute about most important things with most important people.

There are all those reasons why you should continue doing so. It’s dangerous to come out in my home country. It could harm me. It could cause collateral damage to my colleagues, students, professional networks, projects I worked on. It could hurt my family.

But the truth is, people can get no less hurt when you choose to be mute. I know I hurt people by not speaking up about something important to them and choosing silence instead. But there is even a bigger danger. Once you start to pile up silences, little white lies, and strategic omissions, they may grow up to the size of a mountain, and one day simply crumble under their own weight. There will be a lot of pain and harm involved. And I wonder: what if there was no mountain from the very beginning?

Still, the worst is what you are doing to yourself. When you cannot make yourself talk about things that are important to you, you either become a pressure cooker and explode one day – or they slowly die within you, freezing you in the process. And these may be too precious things to lose.

I have thought that eventually, I became better at talking. I have a group of wonderful friends with whom, I thought, I could be more or less myself in every sense, including gay stuff. But somehow, even after all these years, I still cannot do it all, even with them. I cannot even reply to a Facebook challenge about 10 favorite albums, because, like, at least 3 of them would be too gay. I cannot make myself talk about my favorite movies that made an impact on me, because, again: gay. I mumble something unintelligible about my career goals in science, because, in truth, what I mostly care about is how to solve not a grand scientific challenge, but a classic academic “two-body problem” further complicated by a gay twist.

Then one day I saw Love, Simon. That same night, I immediately bought Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda, devoured it in two sleepless nights, and re-read it twice since then. I went to see the movie, like, another seven times. And have listened to the wonderful soundtrack and the score, like, a hundred times already, and don’t plan on stopping any time soon. I simply cannot get enough of this movie and of the Simonverse. And all the time I’ve been trying to sort out why did it hit me so hard and sweet? Why have I suddenly turned into an obsessed teenage fanboy?

Then I realized, I am just so fucking sick and tired of not speaking. I simply cannot stand it anymore. I need to speak. I have to speak. I must speak. Somehow, Simon and his story made it so obvious. Why I was so stupid not realizing it before?

But there’s another twist to that. Everyone deserves a great love story.

I’ve never seen a movie in my life to which I could relate so strongly. Yes, I was that “just like you” kid back then. Living a normal life without any really big problems. Obsessed with music and friendships. Awkward and unable to speak about important things. Alone.

(Oh god. Do you even realize how lonely Simon should have felt if his favorite song is Waltz #2??)

Unfortunately, my great first love story never happened. Instead, I shut myself up for decades to come. But somehow, Love, Simon movie and incredible writing by Becky Albertalli put me right there, back into my seventeen year old me, and finally showed how that first love story could have happened differently, retroactively replacing those long-buried feelings of sadness and despair with joy about the things to come.

And, boy, they did come. Who knew that you can finally get your own very personal great love story when you are at 34, almost ready to give up on happiness? It was wild, it was unpredictable, it was fateful, it was insane, it was unbearably romantic. It was – and, four years later, still is – love.

This story also physically moved me across oceans and continents to, out of all places, the city of Atlanta, Georgia. So, imagine this extra little level of relatability in Love, Simon / Simon vs. (That damn Radiohead, April 2 concert that I did not get to! That gay bar scene!) And now I’m dying to tell my story. Because that’s the most important and amazing thing that happened in my life. Because it is about hope. Because it is about breaking through. Because it is about believing that you deserve everything you want. Because love is a game we deserve to play out loud.

The problem is that I still haven’t quite figured out how to tell my story. Old habits die hard. But I will try. As I said, I cannot stay silent anymore. I need to come out. And I’ll start here.

#love simon #simon vs #svthsa #coming out #coming of age #lgbt

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mullersquad · 4 years ago

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Tainá Müller about her real-life heroine: "I want to play women who help other women"

by Renata Maynart | Oct 16th, 2020 | Interview

As the leading actress of "Good Morning, Veronica", she celebrates the possibility of uniting work and personal concerns

While talking to Revista Donna by phone, the actress Tainá Müller made a restrained outburst.

- I was sure that 2020 would be my professional year - she said, referring to the jobs postponed by the pandemic.

But, a few days later, her protagonist in Good Morning, Veronica, a series inspired by the book by Ilana Casoy and Raphael Montes, would confirm her pre-coronavirus foreboding. Netflix's production was among the most watched in Brazil in early October. And she took her name to the center of a debate around a theme that she has already been a spokesperson for on social media: “Brazil is a brutal country to be a woman.”

PHOTO BY GUSTAVO ZYLBERSTAJN

Like a heroine who fails, cries and takes a beating - literally -, the 38-year-old Porto Alegre woman met one of her purposes with the recently launched project, as she likes to say. Graduated in Journalism and pursuing a postgraduate degree in Contemporary Philosophy, Tainá also looked for a way to put her visibility at the service of the search for real solutions to urgent problems. In the second week of social distancing, she started to invite guests on her Instagram profile to talk about topics such as intersectional feminism, indigenous issues, mental health, and the environment, among others. All works are the result of a restlessness that accompanies her in her studies and in her personal relationships - and which should take a new format on YouTube.

Living in São Paulo with her husband, director Henrique Sauer, and her son, Martin, aged four, she returned to the city where she lived since she was modeling, after an eight-year stint in Rio de Janeiro. Also there is a part of her family nucleus, the sisters and presenters Tuti and Titi Müller. A united trio that helped shape another one of her ambitions:

- I want to play women who help other women.

Revista Donna: How was it to join in a project with a theme that touches you personally?

Tainá Müller: The question of women has always touched me, it is a [thing that I] harping on the same string. When I joined this job, I was aligned with this purpose. There are some that are pure entertainment and have their value. But this one got me in the vein. The theme speaks of Brazil, a brutal country to be a woman when we look at the numbers. These are questions that move me a lot, I came from a female environment, it is one of my life's purposes to interpret women who help other women. She is not a tireless heroine, she makes mistakes, but her intention moves me.

RD: And sharing the set with Ilana Casoy, in Good Morning, Veronica?

TM: Ilana is a very interesting woman. I sat down to lunch with her and I lose track of the time [When I talked to her]. Having her and Raphael Montes (authors of the book that originated the series) on the set was essential. They watched the scenes, helped build the character, and They were also very generous. They understood that the Veronica they wrote is a little different from my version. And I am happy that they are happy with this collective construction.

RD: You commented that you think it is strange to see yourself in the rerun of the soap opera Flor do Caribe.

TM: I was in my fourth soap opera, I hadn't even moved to Rio, I lived so much afterwards. When we talk about 2013, we remember that social upheaval, which resulted in all the madness. I changed, but so did the world. It’s somenthing like who blinked, lost it. If you don't change your values, you are left behind.

RD: You are writing a book with Piangers. How's it going?

TM: It was very curious. I wrote an unpretentious text for Globo called Mãe Não Dorme, about that first-time mother thing, in awe in the world in full transformation. The Companhia das Letras called me, but I kept thinking that, to make a book about motherhood, I should have six children (laughs). Then they brought Piangers to create as if it were a dialogue, talking about how our creation was, and what we pass on or not to our children. Also what we want to heal from this relationship. We met more than a year ago, sometimes we recorded the conversations and we are polishing it. The book comes and goes. It is for the beginning of next year at the latest. It's just not ready because of me (laughs).

PHOTO BY GUSTAVO ZYLBERSTAJN

RD: You moved to São Paulo because of your work and soon the pandemic came. How was the adaptation?

TM: It was a big change, because Martin was born in Rio de Janeiro, he was used to the city and his friends. When my husband and I got jobs in the city, I also thought that my sisters were here and that it would be nice to have this base in São Paulo after eight years in Rio. When social distance started, Martin was adapting in the school, it was a blow. . Now we have a pedagogue who comes home to give him a boost, so he doesn't just stay on his cell phone. And finish repairs on the house that we might not have time to do.

RD: When did you realize that it was time to create new projects in this period?

TM: When we stopped, they said it would be for 15 days, but I went to do some research and realized it was going to be a long time. But I confess that I thought I could still go back this year. After the initial fright, the anxiety started to hit, the feeling of finding everything very suffocating, of seeing people in delicate situations, the whole conduct of this crisis. It was then that, in the second week, I started the lives with people who were thinking about alternatives. What we are experiencing is the result of a society that we invented. And everyone knows, even if intimately, that something has not gone right. Somewhere we fail, disconnecting from the environment that gave us life. All of this made me reflect.

RD: How is the choice of the guests?

TM: Djamila Ribeiro was my teacher in intersectional feminism, and I thought this debate was urgent. Thinking about whiteness, don't just post hashtags. It was a subject in which she was very active, she was already active in my life. Coincidentally, protests came to the United States soon after. We artists are a little bit of an antenna of the world, [it’s like] we understand the collective thinking. My studies about indigenous people was also on the agenda. I have been trying for a while to decolonize my thinking by doing postgraduate studies in Contemporary Philosophy. The Western society has done a lot of incredible things, but not because I want to be different or nice, I think we have to look for other ways. Humanity has a very wide range of thinking that cannot be excluded.

PHOTO BY GUSTAVO ZYLBERSTAJN

RD: When did you come up with the idea of thinking about a format for the YouTube lives?

TM: It was really cool to get the people feedback, and Arruda (Mauricio Arruda,director) is my friend and has a research very similar to mine. We decided to organize, make the most edited thing, cute and put it on Youtube. Or, who knows, even thinking about a bigger project, for a platform later on.

RD: You say that your family has always been very loving, but with a macho model. When did you notice this dynamic?

TM: I have always been uncomfortable with this thing in our culture, with men sitting around drinking beer and women doing the dishes. And I didn't understand why. I only had an idea when I got older and, even more, after I had a son, when I realized that my mother raised three children alone, without a nanny. And until then, I had the thought that “my mother didn't work”. When I realized it, a deep respect came, because I really don't know how she got it. I bought this narrative for a long time, today I don’t buy it anymore.

RD: How has Martin's creation been since this awakening?

TM: I am giving him a very different creation. In my culture, I saw a lot of “stop crying, men don't cry”. Obviously, Martin doesn't hear that phrase. I run away from toxic masculinity, I don't want him to be a reactive guy. And it is in everything, from the orientation of what he has to do when he is beaten at school, to his values.

RD: You use the internet a lot to promote your work. How do you perceive the relationship of people with social networks, mainly talking about women?

TM: It is a lot of the timeline that we choose for you. Mine only has a wonderful woman (laughs). But, yes, the vulnerability of people on the social network is very important, it brings less loneliness. I am not interested in those who only sell wealth and perfection. I follow powerful women who are in the struggle, they influence culture in a positive way. The social network brought a lot of light, a lot of democracy, but it also has a lot of shade, a lot of comparison. It is important to think about what each profile arouses you.

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newssplashy · 6 years ago

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Jonathan Gold, the restaurant critic whose curious, far-ranging, relentless explorations of his native Los Angeles helped his readers understand dozens of cuisines and helped the city understand itself.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Margy Rochlin, a close friend.

In more than a thousand reviews published since the 1980s, Gold chronicled his city’s pupuserias, bistros, diners, nomadic taco trucks, soot-caked outdoor rib and brisket smokers, sweaty indoor xiao long bao steamers, postmodern pizzerias, vintage delicatessens, strictly omakase sushi-yas, Roman gelaterias, Korean porridge parlors, Lanzhou hand-pullled noodle vendors, Iranian tongue-sandwich shops, vegan hot dog griddles, cloistered French-leaning hyper-seasonal tasting counters and wood-paneled Hollywood grills with chicken potpie and martinis on every other table.

Unlike some critics, Gold never saw expensive, rarefied restaurants as the peak of the terrain he surveyed, although he reviewed his share of them. Shiki Beverly Hills, Noma and Alinea all took turns under his critical loupe. He was in his element, though, when he championed small, family-run establishments where publicists and wine lists were unheard-of and English was often a second language, if it was spoken at all.

“Before Tony Bourdain, before reality TV and ‘Parts Unknown’ and people really being into ethnic food in a serious way, it was Jonathan who got it, completely,” writer and editor Ruth Reichl said. “He really got that food was a gateway into the people, and that food could really define a community. He was really writing about the people more than the food.”

Gold wrote about restaurants for Gourmet, California and Los Angeles magazines, but the bulk of his reviews appeared in two newspapers: LA Weekly, where in 2007 he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, and the Los Angeles Times, where he had been the chief critic since 2012, treating the restaurants of famous and obscure chefs as if he saw no distinction between them. Each publication hired him twice, with long breaks between tours of duty.

He became the subject of a documentary called “City of Gold,” a role model imitated painstakingly and largely in vain by a generation of food writers, a living street atlas of Southern California, the inspiration for a rap tribute in which his list of “99 Essential LA Restaurants” was declaimed over the beat of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” and a verb. When actor Mindy Kaling asked Twitter for a pizza recommendation, she added: “Don’t Jonathan Gold me and tell me to go to the San Gabriel Valley.”

He may not have eaten everything in Los Angeles, but nobody came closer. He rarely went to the subject of one of his reviews without stopping to try four or five other places along the way. He once estimated that in the hunt for interesting new things to eat and write about, he put 20,000 miles on his green Dodge Ram 1500 pickup truck each year. While driving, he liked listening to opera.

If a new group of immigrants turned up in Los Angeles County, chances were good he had already studied the benchmark dishes of their cuisine in one or more of the 3,000 to 5,000 cookbooks he owned. If a restaurant opened, he probably knew the names and specialties of the last five restaurants at that address. In a 2006 review of a Beverly Hills steakhouse, he recalled going to the same location to eat patty melts with his mother and to drink warm beer that a sympathetic waitress poured into teacups after hours when he was a young punk rocker, all in the first paragraph.

“LA always seemed better when he wrote about it,” film critic John Powers, a friend of Gold’s, said. “You just thought, There’s so much stuff here.”

He made a subspecialty of one street in particular. Reichl, who hired him at the Times and Gourmet, recalls his telling her in the 1980s that he had eaten every taco on Pico Boulevard. It was not just tacos. Eventually he wrote about his fascination with the street in a 1998 article that began, “For a while in my early 20s, I had only one clearly articulated ambition: to eat at least once at every restaurant on Pico Boulevard, starting with the fried yucca dish served at a pupuseria near the downtown end and working methodically westward toward the chili fries at Tom’s No. 5 near the beach. It seemed a reasonable enough alternative to graduate school.”

In 2016, Ecco Press bought his proposal for a memoir, which Gold called “a culinary coming of age book, I guess.” It was to be called “Breakfast on Pico.”

Jonathan Gold was born July 28, 1960, in South Los Angeles, where he was raised. His mother, Judith, was a school librarian who had been a magician’s assistant. Irwin Gold, his father, was a probation officer assigned to supervise Roman Polanski and Charles Manson, among other offenders. Jonathan later recalled eating Rice-A-Roni every Tuesday night and spending much of his childhood in his room, playing the cello. When he was old enough to fall under the influence of new wave, he plugged in his instrument and sawed away at it in the short-lived local band Overman.

With cello proficiency in his favor, he attended the University of California, Los Angeles. Although he got his degree in music history, in 1982, he had a sideline in art; he took a class with and worked as an assistant for guerrilla performance artist Chris Burden. For a brief time, Gold thought of himself as a performance artist, too. “A naked performance artist, to be specific,” he told an interviewer. His materials for one piece were two bottles of Glade air freshener, a pile of supermarket broiler chickens, a live chicken at the end of a rope and a machete wielded by Gold, who wore only a blindfold. The chicken survived and may have come out of the ordeal in better spirits than Gold, who later said, “The few minutes after an art performance are some of the most depressing in the world.”

While he was in college, Gold walked into the office of LA Weekly, an alternative paper, where he was soon reading proofs and pitching big, doomed ideas about the zeitgeist. For a time in the 1980s, he was the newspaper’s music editor, and by the 1990s he was better known as a music journalist than a food writer, contributing long articles to Spin, Details and other magazines. While reporting a Rolling Stone article about the emergence of gangsta rap, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg gave him a nickname: Nervous Cuz.

The music scene changes at a pace that can wear out a middle-aged writer, but food writers tend to improve as they get more meals under their belt. In 1986, Gold had started a column for LA Weekly about the kinds of places where he liked to eat. It was called Counter Intelligence. Week by week, year by year, he built a reputation for finding restaurants that were virtually unknown outside the neighborhoods of immigrants who were often the only customers until he walked in.

In his peregrinations, he came to appreciate how Los Angeles’s far-flung neighborhoods allowed small, distinct cultures to flourish without bumping into each other.

“In New York, because it is so condensed, you’re very aware of who’s around,” he once said, “whereas in Los Angeles, if you open a Korean restaurant, there’s a good chance you’ll only serve to Koreans. That sort of isolation is not necessarily good for politics or civil life, but it is really good for food.”

Far from a stunt eater, he nevertheless understood that a writer trying to persuade unseen strangers to read about a restaurant one or two counties away cannot afford to dismiss the persuasive power of chopped goats’ brains, pigs’ blood soup or an octopus leg separated from the rest of a living octopus so recently that it twirls itself around the nearest pair of chopsticks.

These delicacies and others were described in language that was anachronistic in its rolling, deliberate gait but exquisitely contemporary in its allusions. He could pack infinitesimal shadings of nuance into a rhetorical question.

The hallmark of his style, though, was the second-person voice. He used it prodigiously. Taken literally, he seemed to be saying that you, personally, had visited a great number of restaurants and consumed a wide variety of animal parts that, taken together, nobody but Gold had ever visited and consumed.

In “City of Gold,” Sue Horton, an editor at Reuters, says of his use of the second person, “He’s forming a bond with the reader: You and I are people who eat deer penis.”

His prose was apparently as agonizing to produce as it was pleasurable to read. For a time he saw a therapist for writer’s block until it was mutually agreed that somebody as prolific as Gold could not be described as blocked. Editors were driven to despair by his habit of taking deadlines seriously only once they were safely in the past. Powers, who edited him at LA Weekly, called him “the Usain Bolt of being slow.”

Like many restaurant critics, he tried to keep his image out of circulation for years. Anybody who had seen him was unlikely to forget him, though. He was more than 6 feet tall, with wispy ripples of shoulder-length strawberry blond hair that in recent years had tended to avoid the top of his scalp. His chin was capacious. When he turned up at a Peruvian stall in a food court a few years ago, the chef, Ricardo Zarate, wondered why so many pictures were being take by a man who “looked like George Washington.” He figured it out a few weeks later when Gold’s review was published.

Informally, the incognito phase ended when a photograph of Gold celebrating his Pulitzer win in a pink, Champagne-basted shirt got around. Officially, it was finished when he allowed LA Weekly to publish his photograph shortly before the release of “City of Gold” in 2015.

Between his amiability and his longevity on the job, he accumulated friends in the restaurant business. Some of his disclosures could make interesting reading. When he reviewed David Chang’s new restaurant in Los Angeles, Majordomo, his thoughts on the cooking took up only slightly more space than his partial history of his dealings with Chang.

In his first term at LA Weekly he met Laurie Ochoa, an intern and now an editor, whom he married in 1990. They went to restaurants together and contrived to work together, moving in tandem from one publication to another: the Los Angeles Times, Gourmet, LA Weekly again, the Times again.

She survives him, along with their children, Isabel and Leon, and Gold’s brother, Mark, the associate director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA.

Many claims have been made for Gold’s criticism, but he saw his work in modest terms. He wanted to make Los Angeles smaller.

“I’m not a cultural anthropologist,” he once said. “I write about taco stands and fancy French restaurants to try to get people less afraid of their neighbors and to live in their entire city instead of sticking to their one part of town.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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newssplashy · 6 years ago

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Entertainment: Jonathan Gold, food critic who celebrated la's Cornucopia, dies at 57

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Margy Rochlin, a close friend.

“LA always seemed better when he wrote about it,” film critic John Powers, a friend of Gold’s, said. “You just thought, There’s so much stuff here.”

In 2016, Ecco Press bought his proposal for a memoir, which Gold called “a culinary coming of age book, I guess.” It was to be called “Breakfast on Pico.”

In his peregrinations, he came to appreciate how Los Angeles’s far-flung neighborhoods allowed small, distinct cultures to flourish without bumping into each other.

In “City of Gold,” Sue Horton, an editor at Reuters, says of his use of the second person, “He’s forming a bond with the reader: You and I are people who eat deer penis.”

She survives him, along with their children, Isabel and Leon, and Gold’s brother, Mark, the associate director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA.

Many claims have been made for Gold’s criticism, but he saw his work in modest terms. He wanted to make Los Angeles smaller.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

source https://www.newssplashy.com/2018/07/entertainment-jonathan-gold-food-critic_22.html

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