Consuming Louisville is not the only Michelle Jones blog getting a major update under the hood. I’m ditching Movable Type on every single site that I have. I’m using .htaccess to update feed links but I’m not sure it’s working so you may want to subscribe again.
I don’t remember which one of “the girls” introduced me to Jimmy Buffett but it was one of them.
The girls. That was us. Me, Amy, Bethany and Laurie. It was the four of us against the world in high school.
Those girls were some of the great loves of my life. The years of friendship spent with them still, to this day, hold great meaning for me even though the relationships have long since ended.
I think it was Laurie who loved Jimmy Buffett first. Her older brother was probably into him and it trickled down to us. The four of us listened to Buffett in our cars riding around in the country. Buffett music and R.E.M. blared from boomboxes as we splashed in my parents’ pool.
We all had Spanish classes together and we all knew that my dream job was to run a bar in Cuba, so Jimmy Buffett music was a natural fit.
When I graduated high school I only received one official “graduation present.” The girls had pooled their money and bought me the Jimmy Buffett box set, on cassette. I’ve since replaced it with the CD version and have it all digitized now of course but I kept those tapes for the longest time just to look at.
As a grown up I can look at Buffett music with a bit more of a critical eye. I can acknowledge that maybe, possibly he is not quite a lyrical genius. But he sums up living for the moment, choosing the kind of life you want to live and wrapping yourself up in a moment better than most.
And when I hear “Death of an Unpopular Poet” I get a little weepy. And when I hear “The Weather is Here” I think of how hysterically we laughed. And when I hear “Margaritaville” I remember countless Wednesday nights at Puero Vallarta when inevitably a frat boy would request Margaritaville from the mariachi band.
When I moved to Louisville with B my relationship with the girls was over, I just didn’t know it yet. As I tried to keep it alive and I as I mourned its death sitting on the front porch of our first Louisville apartment, sipping margaritas out of a plastic cup and listening to the Buffett box set reminded me that once, I loved those girls and those girls loved me like nothing else in this world.
When I saw Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood it broke my heart. Not only because “OMG such similar mother issues!” but because that should have been the four of us. We should have been snarky, semi-alcoholic old women together. Even though that will never come to pass Buffett music reminds me viscerally of when that lifelong relationship was still possible.
Ah, that’s it. Jimmy Buffett’s music is frothy and playful and fun and it reminds me of all life’s potential and possibilities. I like each new Buffett album less than I like the previous one but I can listen to any of the four discs from the box set and fall in love all over again. And as I get older “A Pirate Looks at Forty” gets me every single time. That is all.
Harry: What is this we’re listening to?
Karen: Joni Mitchell.
Harry: I can’t believe you still listen to Joni Mitchell.
Karen:I love her and true love lasts a lifetime.
Love Actually
Inspired in part by all the end of year and end of decade lists but mostly by Jason’s awesome The Two Zeros series I’m about to start a series I’m calling “This Love Affair.” I am not a meticulous keeper of my pop culture consumption like Jason is. His deep commitment to scrobbling his music has given him a wealth of data that is so cool to dig through. I don’t have that, I’ve only been using Last.fm for a year or so and I’m bad about making sure everything gets scrobbled anyway.
It wouldn’t work for me to try to break down music and films and books that I’ve loved year by year or even decade by decade. What I am interested in doing though is exploring my relationship with some artists, some albums, some movies and some books that I have deep and undying love affairs with. Like Emma Thompson says in Love Actually true love lasts a lifetime and there are some artists and pieces of art that I’ve go nothing but true love for.
I dig Apple’s iWork very much. I do just about all my word processing in Pages as well as laying out newsletters, brochures and other print documents for my semi-day job with it. One of the great things about iWork is all the cool templates that come with it. The templates in both Pages and Keynote are really great jumping off points for coming up with unique designs of your own.
My one frustration with iWork though has been that I couldn’t figure out how to access the master list of all the available graphics and clipart that come with the various templates. Yeah I guess you could open up every single template and then drag whatever graphics you want into the document you’re working on but no one in their right mind is going to do that.
There isn’t an obvious folder where these files are stored, nor do the individual image files have logical names that you can search for and last but not least Google failed me when I queried about finding these files. So today I spent some time monkeying around my hard drive and finally found the goldmine. Now I have access to all the template images that come with Pages & Keynote so I can easily find and use them in whatever template I choose, instead of just the one that they are natively associated with.
Since I couldn’t easily find the info to do this on the interwebs I thought I’d post the instructions to possibly help other people who would perhaps like to do the same.
1. Open your Applications folder
2. Open iWork folder (I have both iWork 08 and iWork 09 on my system but for this process iWork 09 is what I was using).
3. Right click on Pages and choose “Show Package Contents” (note that you will have to repeat this procedure for Keynote. The image files for the two sets of templates are not in the same location).
That’s it. In the “Shared” folder you’ll find all the images that are used in Pages templates.
Yep, “Not Your Bubbe’s Book Club” is the title I came up with for the Jewish book class/discussion group I’m going to be leading at shul.
Here’s the class description:
Jews are known for loving study, conversation and questions, particularly intelligent, passionate ones. AJ’s new Jewish book group will blend books, study, conversation and questions to create an interesting and intellectually stimulating experience for exploring Judaism, its history, culture and our relationships with it and our lives as Jews through literature.The group will read and discuss a wide range of books from contemporary novels, historical fiction, graphic novels, topical anthologies, memoirs and scholarly works. The only common denominators are that each book will relate in some way to Judaism and all of them are great jumping off points for interesting discussions, study and debate.
Continuing AJ’s recent trend of innovative uses of technology the book group will, when possible, use video conferencing and other communication tools to bring authors into the discussions of their works.
My rebbetzin and I are toying with the idea of me teaching a Jewish book class/leading a Jewish book discussion group at shul. Naturally I’m beyond thrilled at the possibility. Me? Leading discussions on Jewish books? How great a fit is that?
As soon as she mentioned the idea to me I started working on the list of books that I’d potentially like to have the class read. I share the list with her yesterday and thought I’d shared it here as well.
Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism
A provocative collection of impassioned essays by an unorthodox group of young Jewish feminists. The 20 writers wrestle with a wide range of issues from mainstream concerns like identity and Zionism, to edgier ones such as witchcraft and transgender theory. Particularly challenging is Haviva Ner-David’s “Parenting as a Religious Jewish Feminist.” Having grown up feeling “marginalized and irrelevant,” Ner-David is now studying with an Orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem for rabbinic ordination. She prays with the male accouterments of phylacteries and prayer shawl, and has taken part in other traditionally male rituals. Attuned to the discomfort she produces in other observant Jews, she expresses ambivalence about imposing her customs on her daughters. Loolwa Khazzoom, a Jew of Iraqi descent, describes the alienation she felt sitting behind the women’s prayer partition and in the face of condescension from Jews of European descent. Like the other writers here, instead of simply rejecting Judaism, Khazzoom is actively involved in redefining her Jewishness, currently working as program coordinator of the Jewish Multicultural Education Project when she is not singing and playing bass for her all-girls band. A left-wing religious Jew, Emily Wages takes on those progressive Jews who identify Judaism with oppression, patriarchy and xenophobia, while they honor other religions and cultures. With an upbeat foreword by noted Jewish scholar and feminist Susannah Heschel, this cutting-edge anthology is a welcome testament to how Jewish Gen-X women are finding their own distinctive voices.
Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion by Rabbi Danya Ruttenburg
Ruttenberg, who was recently ordained as a rabbi, decided at the age of 13 that she was an atheist. Then in the late 1990s, she experienced a spiritual awakening, taking what she describes as a winding, semi-reluctant path through traditional Jewish practice that eventually took me to the rabbinate. Ruttenberg writes that for her the work of the religious life has been about reconfiguration and reintegration, determining which parts she has outgrown and which could grow with her. The author, who lives in Los Angeles, lived for some time in Jerusalem. A tremendously satisfying memoir of spiritual awakening from the author of a variety of books and periodicals.
Yom Kippur A Go Go by Matthue Roth
From the World Bank riots (what can you do when the revolution starts on Shabbos?) to Thursday night tranny basketball in San Francisco’s Mission Dolores Park, Matthue takes readers on a journey through the queer and hip streets of urban America in his exuberant memoir, Yom Kippur a Go-Go. With humor and insight, Roth describes the tension between contemporary life and the demands of faith. He falls in love and in lust with a panoply of girls, both strictly kosher and determinedly secular, to the accompaniment of rabbinical lectures on modesty (“Boys are nothing but perverts and filthy animals!”).
The Fruit of Her Hands: The Story of Shira of Ashkenaz by Michelle Cameron
Crafting a richly textured, absorbing novel based on the life of her ancestor, renowned thirteenth-century Jewish scholar Meir ben Baruch of Rothenberg, Michelle Cameron paints a page-turning and deeply personal portrait of Judaism in medieval France and Germany. Imagined through the eyes of Rabbi Meir’s wife, Shira, this opulent drama reveals a devout but independent woman who struggles to preserve her religious traditions while remaining true to herself as she and her family witness the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe.
Matzoh Ball Gumbo by Marcie Cohen Ferris
Many traditional Southern foods–pulled-pork barbecue, crab cakes, fried oyster po’ boys, to name a few–violate traditional Jewish dietary laws, which forbid the consumption of pork and shellfish. What’s a Southern Jew to do? Anthropological historian Ferris (UNC-Chapel Hill) answers that question in a gustatory tour of the Jewish South. She uncovers many dishes that blend Jewish and Southern foodways (recipes included for such tasties as Temple Israel Brisket and Cornmeal-Fried Fish Fillets with Sephardic Vinagre Sauce). Ferris sees food as a symbol that encompasses the problem of how Jews live in a region dominated by Christians: “The most tangible way to understand Jewish history and culture in the South is at the dinner table.” Cynics will wonder if a Jewish kugel (noodle casserole) prepared in the South is really any different from kugel in Chicago. Ferris’s answer is an emphatic yes–because Jews in the South face different challenges than those in Chicago. Southern Jews must be more intentional about cooking that kugel and passing the recipe down from generation to generation. If this book were a restaurant, Michelin would award it two out of three stars: not absolutely first-rate, but “excellent cooking, worth a detour.”
Miriam’s Kitchen by Elizabeth Ehrlich
Food memoirs often delve into the meaning of life. This hardly surprises–memories are as essential to daily life as the food that sustains us. Miriam’s Kitchen blends recipes and food reminiscences with family narratives and observations about the author’s personal evolution as a Jew. Ehrlich weaves the stories from four generations of family life, punctuated with powerful and often tragic memories. While her mother-in-law, Miriam, is teaching her to make chicken livers with noodles, Ehrlich unexpectedly learns how Miriam, her mother, and husband survived a Nazi labor camp in Poland during the Holocaust. Using vivid and bare yet discreet words, she graphically tells what they suffered and the nightmares that still haunt them.
Ehrlich’s own story covers her transformation from a child whose family lit Sabbath candles but went boating on Yom Kippur, to an adult who chooses an Orthodox life marked by ambivalence about the rigors of being kosher and pride in what she is passing on to her children. Recipes for Honey Cake, Noodle Pudding, and many others are buried treasures hidden among Ehrlich’s intense words. Sadly omitted is a recipe for potato kugel. Her grandmother uses this tempting pudding to good-naturedly test, taunt, and ultimately as the means for accepting her daughter Selina’s non-Jewish fiancé into the family. Happily for us, 24 other tempting kosher recipes make up for this one missed dish. Miriam’s Kitchen is a gripping and gratifying memoir of food, life, tragedy, and family survival.
This is Where I Leave You by Jonathon Tropper
Few Jewish responses to tragedy resonate quite as powerfully as shiva, the week of mourning required of families after the passing of a close relative. Instead of a wake, the traditional Jewish response to death gathers the mourners together, has them sit on low stools, plies them with whitefish salad and lox, and waits until they begin to kibbitz about the dear departed. Jonathan Tropper, whose previous novels include The Book of Joe and Plan B, realized this ritual provides perfect fodder for a darkly comic family novel. He sets his latest, This Is Where I Leave You (Dutton, August) during a secular, e
stranged family’s week of mourning, adding in a failing marriage, an unexpected pregnancy, and plenty of other dysfunctions for good measure.
My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
Potok’s familiar style but an interesting story about struggling to follow one’s heart, one’s path and one’s faith.
Lovesong by Julius Lester
Lester, son of a black southern Methodist minister, writes of the eventful odyssey that culminated in his conversion to Judaism. The private journey was often at odds with his public life. As writer, radio commentator in New York and college professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lester’s outspoken and unconventional views often angered blacks as well as whites, and placed him in a political and philosophical fray between blacks and Jews. His spiritual quest, begun here with a lovingly detailed sketch of his southern heritage, took many turns, involving visits to sites of faith (Gethsemani Abbey, Wounded Knee, Shakertown) and intensive exploration of religious cultures, until he acknowledged the pull of the Jewish faith. He discusses his interracial marriage and fatherhood, and pays moving tribute to the fulfillment he finds in celebrating the Jewish faith
The Big Kahn by Neil Kleid (this is a graphic novel)
Rabbi David Kahn has lived a forty-year lie: he is not, nor has he ever been, Jewish. When at his funeral, the rabbi s grifter brother reveals the truth, it forces the Kahn family to struggle with grief and betrayal as their congregation examines their every move and question their very faith. His son, Rabbi Avi Kahn, the heir apparent, spirals down in an affair with his rebellious sister Lea s non-Jewish roommate. Lea rethinks the religion she s run from, strong enough to alter her father s life, while Eli the youngest Kahn inherits his father s long-forgotten legacy. Somehow, with the help of the uncle he never knew and his slowly re-awakening sister, he attempts to return faith and order to his family and community and reinstate his father s good name.
You Or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr
A love story rolled up in literature lessons. The narrator is the incandescent, opinionated, very well read, and professorial Anne. Born in England, the child of diplomats, Anne marries the Brooklyn-born and equally erudite Howard Rosenbaum, and they produce a very precocious son, Samuel. Anne’s natural sense of otherness, heightened by her Jewish in-laws’ lack of enthusiasm at their marriage, is further stretched when Howard accepts a studio executive position and moves the family to Los Angeles. Anne struggles to find a niche for herself, finally meeting success the moment she sets up a book club at the behest of a couple of Howard’s colleagues. Anne’s brilliance in running this salon fuels Hollywood’s boundless hunger for the next great screenplay. Soon Anne is dividing her book readers by film industry types, multiplying the number of groups, and her business is born. What of the love story? The differences of faith between Anne and Howard surface after their son returns from a trip to Israel, and Anne must work her literary magic to retrieve their love. If only for the lessons in linguistics and literature, this is recommended for all fiction collections.
This is the book I told you about a couple months ago where the author and I have a profound difference of opinion about religion at large and Judaism in particular but it sure does give you a lot to think about.
———
Let me know what you think.
Love,
Michelle
1. Two Shabbats ago I told my rebbetzin that I was a little sad that my (hypothetical) baby won’t have any Jewish grandparents. She gave me a funny look and said “Are you nuts? Look around. Bring that kid to shul once and it’s done.”
2. On that same Shabbat my rabbi said “I turned down a trade for you.” Excuse me. “A trade. Another congregation offered a current board member, a former congregation president and a left fielder for our softball team in exchange for you. Three people in trade for you and I turned them down flat. You aren’t going anywhere.” Shouldn’t I be involved in any trade talks? “Nope, you’re here to stay.”
1. Two Shabbats ago I told my rebbetzin that I was a little sad that my (hypothetical) baby won’t have any Jewish grandparents. She gave me a funny look and said “Are you nuts? Look around. Bring that kid to shul once and it’s done.”
2. On that same Shabbat my rabbi said “I turned down a trade for you.” Excuse me. “A trade. Another congregation offered a current board member, a former congregation president and a left fielder for our softball team in exchange for you. Three people in trade for you and I turned them down flat. You aren’t going anywhere.” Shouldn’t I be involved in any trade talks? “Nope, you’re here to stay.”
All appearances to the contrary it hasn’t been easy for me to celebrate my birthday this year. I’ve been trying to take my friend Barry’s advice and “fake it until you make it.” I am getting better everyday though and making this gratitude list that I’m about to share with you certainly helped.
All appearances to the contrary it hasn’t been easy for me to celebrate my birthday this year. I’ve been trying to take my friend Barry’s advice and “fake it until you make it.” I am getting better everyday though and making this gratitude list that I’m about to share with you certainly helped.
About
Nerd, reader, baker, happily pair-bonded, lesbian, Jew.
Someone said
“Don't worry, if you die in a horribly improbable accident, a team of beautiful people led by a brilliant but broken man will figure it out.”
– The Subliminal Reassurances of Procedural Dramas
24 November 2005
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