My most immediate frustration is with the whole Tiger Woods ridiculosity.  As soon as the story starts to lose a little traction, we’re given a new set of pundits trying to deconstruct all the religious implications: would he have fallen to this level of licentiousness if he were a Christian?  [Answer: Ted Haggard, Jim Bakker, Thomas Weeks, Michael Reid, Jimmy Swaggert, Tony Alamo, Father James Porter and his merry band of pedophiles; it’s a long, illustrious list, people.] We all know Woods’ philandering has nothing to do with Buddha or even some ersatz sex addiction for Dr. Drew to fix up. It’s all thanks to our own over-indulgent star-maker machinery chugging out trash by the bucketful.  When someone makes it, we’ll give him anything in the hope of winning His beneficence and getting a little piece of his starlight. Sure the guy can hit, carry, or throw a ball.  But then we turn him into a god and start licking his $300 sneakers to curry favor.  Except, these aren’t gods.  Most of them are stupid, selfish little boys being led around by their wieners.  Eventually their ego and immaturity win out and they start believing their own press.  We build the brand and the temples and the absurd pedestals.  Then when they fall off, we all start circling and pointing fingers and licking our chops.  It’s revolting.

While the incessant boy worship thing bothers me, I’m a lot more concerned about women and how we’re allowing ourselves to be portrayed in this weird construct.  Sadly, all the Tiger chicks are only drops in the proverbial slut bucket.

Clicking through the early evening cable nausea, we have the emotionally crippled socialites of [pick a city: Orange CA, Newark NJ, Atlanta GA, New York NY, Aspen CO], and all the caustic reunion shows that seem to have found their own blood supply.  Then there’s a family whose only real claim to fame rides on the unusually large ass of one of its daughters.  Oh, look!  It’s a spin-off in Miami for the Lesser Kardashians.  Queue up the DVR!  They’re apparently going down there to save their failing clothing store.  You can bet we’ll not be sitting in on their marketing strategy sessions.  Oh, silly me!  The strategy is to position E! camera crews in/outside the store so we can watch the girls who are so famous for …being famous.  Who needs advertising?  I’ve got a hundred bucks that says they’ll hire some fiery loud-mouthed Latina to help run the place and make their lives a living hell.  Yep, taking up residence in reigning queen of skank towns is bound to create lots of spicy new drama for our mascara’d marvelettes.

Here’s the tragedy: the vapid Kardashians are as close as we get to admirable. They sort of have jobs; they seem to care about their family.  Then you have The Bad Girls Club.  Real World [insert city].  For the Love of… some RayJay person.  Jersey Shore.  Even the notorious man bashing sessions at The Tool Academy include some female monsters this season.  With every click of the remote we’re served another gaggle of maladjusted women, all shot up with cow piss and plastic, preoccupied with criticizing one another and yanking each other’s $5,000 hair extensions.  And if they aren’t already dripping in unwarranted fame and excess, they’re obsessed with getting it at any cost.  My favorite part is between the main events when we’re entertained with infomercials for exercise programs built around stripper poles and lap dancing.  What the hell is going on?  Why are we shocked when men are caught acting like pigs and our 12 year old daughters are coming home with belly rings and tongue studs?

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not for one minute saying that women should be ashamed of being sexual and that we should all get back into our gingham aprons where we belong.  But we should most certainly be ashamed of being ignorant, hostile and criminally shallow.   How can we possibly decry the bad examples being set by our heroes and trampy starlets when we gobble down every unsavory scrap of People magazine they put in front of us?  Decent souls doing good in the world don’t make anywhere near the kind of bank being pocketed by the sideshow freaks.  We’re the ones stuffing dollar bills in their g-strings, then we get all mad when they cross some arbitrary line in our moral sand.

Naturally, I’d prefer that we assess our own priorities and start fixing the root causes of all this broke-ass behavior.  But at minimum, we need to stop crying foul when our celebrities, politicians and various clingers-on don’t live up to the bizarre double standard we’ve created for them.

First of all, the nature of yeast is confounding.  Animal?  Vegetable?  Sea monkey?  We didn’t do much real baking at our house, so the yeast packets were written in Aramaic.  This should’ve been the first indicator of death, but who thinks about little grains of stinky sand as being alive in the first place?  Even if the leavening was hale and hearty, I worried about the exact temperature of lukewarm.  FYI, there is no ‘lukewarm’ indicator on a baby thermometer, which was older than me and probably didn’t work anyway.  Proofing?  Strange little verb.  Chances are, I either cooked the rascals before they could start farting into my dough, or froze their non-existent nuts off.

Since the yeast was probably DOA, there was little rising and no real ‘punching down’ to be done.  Kneading was a fun activity but I had no idea what should be happening or what to look for.  No matter what I tried, every attempt came out like a lump of dysmorphic building material.  Even the frozen dumbshit-proof Rhodes bread would break any plate or knife unlucky enough to wander into its gravitational pull.  I was panne morte.  Bread Dead.

And then I was given a new bible: Artisan Breads in 5 Minutes a Day.

My pal Seana promised success.  No matter how clearly I cataloged my failures, she was positive I could do this.  I finally agreed, assuring her that I’d still love her.  Well… once I got over the abject despair, at any rate.

So I read the first few chapters, invested in some tools (a good baking stone, pizza peel, scraper/cutter thingie, oven thermometer), along with some fresh flour and yeast.  It didn’t all make sense in my head, but I stopped asking questions about how and why and simply followed the steps.  About an hour later, I had a crackly golden orb of deliciousness resting on my cooling rack.  I checked every few minutes until it was cool enough to handle; I couldn’t wait to cut into the damned thing.  Sure enough, the crust had that light cracker-snappy feel.  A little chip even flung up into my eye just like the real baguettes from Grand Central!!  The crumb (inside stuff) was lush — if a bit more dense than I prefer.  This was delicious and sandwich-ready, but I like the big air pockets with a slightly more toothsome feel.  Out of nowhere comes this wise old bread voice saying, “the dough should be wetter next time.”  I felt like the Scarecrow when he finally got that stupid diploma.  ‘As the bread bakes, trapped water turns to steam and generates pockets with volume equal to the square root of an isosceles triangle!’  Eureka!!  Wetter dough!  I learned that from the book!!

I’ve successfully baked up a fresh loaf every couple of days, all from that first batch I made.  And I started a new — wetter — batch that I’ll try out tonight.  I’ll reach into the bucket in my fridge, pull out a gooey handful, make some balloon animal shape, rest it for about 40 minutes, put it in the oven, and will have fresh homemade bread half an hour later.  Yes, it’s ridiculous, but I can’t explain how freakin’ gratifying it is.  I made BREAD!  I conquered my culinary nemesis.  Every day I draw pretty pictures using state-of-the-art software and decode the Internet genome and make technology quiver and cry at my feet, but today I made BREAD.

I am Woman.  Hear me mother-effin roar!

The point is that we don’t have to pay for God, or placate others to intervene with God on our behalf.  It seems to me that God – or the idea of perfect goodness – really does live inside of each of us.  Every time we put someone else’s well being ahead of our own; when we make something beautiful or do something extraordinary; when we’re calm and quiet or thrilled beyond words – THAT’S God.  God is us at our very best.  God is our awe at life and the world around us.  God is our own unmitigated joy.

I think God may also be parading around as James Erb.  Because every time I hear a choir sing his arrangement of “Shenandoah” I break out in head-to-toe goose bumps and sob uncontrollably.  It has little to do with the text.  It’s an unremarkable little wagon trail tune that holds no relevance for me whatsoever.  They could be singing about plumbing or a recipe for bread dough.  My apoplexy is entirely about the sounds being coaxed out of those people on the risers.  There’s a quiet majesty in how the whole piece is constructed and how well it knows the human voice; how it builds one simple idea upon another until you’re drowning in glory.  And when it all winds down and the tenors sail for that beautiful high E, your heart feels like it might burst.

(Turn up your speakers!  The bass/baritone section is particularly rich and chocolatey)

And God being the cagey fellow that He is, it’s not just James Erb.  There’s an arrangement of “Oh, Holy Night” that I heard performed by the Yale Whiffenpoofs (okay, not the most awe-inspiring name ever imagined) that will have me undone for hours afterward.  The thing that really gets me is how prayer-like it is.  We’re used to hearing the command to “FALL ON YOUR KNEES – Oh HEEEEEAR the angel VOOOOOICES!  Oh NIIIIIIIGHT di-VIIIINE…” You get the picture.  But this one is tender and quiet; it’s magical.  It’s something you’d sing while watching a baby sleep.  That’s where God lives for me: Inside those notes and sounds; inside the concept of that song and the inspiration to arrange and perform it in that specific way.  Say what you will about miracles, but the all-you-can-eat fish buffet’s got nothin’ on this one.  And look – it’s right here.  I can play it again.  

Hold on to your wimple because here is where I get really heretical: When Christ said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” and no one gets to heaven “except through me,” we weren’t being told to worship Jesus the man – or even Jesus the son of God.  We were being invited to find God in ourselves.  He was calling up the “I” that is all of us.  I am the way.  It’s MY goodness, my joy, my willingness to share what I have and to do good works that determines my state of grace, and not because it’s written down somewhere.  I am at my happiest when I’ve made someone else’s life a little nicer.  There’s my heaven.  I don’t feel that when I’m sitting with a bunch of other people in a building listening to someone tell me about fearing God, or the four cowboys of the apocalypse, or some impish beast doing a jig in a pit of brimstone.  That’s pure silliness.

But I suppose some folks need to know that they’ve sat through their weekly hour of silliness and paid to have their heaven ticket punched.  If that’s where they find their grace, then I support and encourage it wholeheartedly.  The problem starts when the ticket-punchers expect others to live and die by their arbitrary rules.  I deeply resent the fact that those who pay their hour of silliness consider themselves entitled to impinge upon the rights and free will of others.  I resent the self-righteousness and false piety and the idea that one morning in church will wipe away a week’s worth of meanness.  I think a philosophy is critically flawed when it says a loving and generous Muslim will go to hell while a chronically philandering but sufficiently apologetic Christian gets a hero’s welcome at the pearly gates. That philosophy feeds the weakest, ugliest aspects of our nature: the need to feel exclusive and chosen over others; to be better than.  I want nothing to do with it.     

All but the most hard-boiled of us acknowledge the idea of a higher power, whether it’s Praying The Rosary or Using The Force.  I don’t believe in some grandfatherly being in a big gilded chair throwing thunderbolts or handing out favor like gumdrops.  So I suppose some will say I don’t believe in God.  But I believe in Good.  I believe that each of us is capable of divinity, whether through art or music or words, or simply by being decent to one another.  I believe the only real evil is the hatred, judgment and violence that we have inside of us.  I believe that having a God or Devil nearby gives us permission to attribute or blame our actions on some will other than our own.  I prefer to take full responsibility for my actions and their consequences.  And I prefer to think that heaven is immediately attainable by anyone who chooses a course of kindness, tolerance, and understanding.  And as far as I’m concerned, it’s available to anyone willing to bring on the goose bumps of James Erb and the Whiffenpoofs.

Well I suppose ‘art’ is a little generous, but there was an interesting movie released several years ago starring one of my favorite actors of all time, Samuel L. Jackson.  I can’t think of another actor who can go so seamlessly from badass roughian  (Jackie Brown, Pulp Fiction) to gentle sophisticate (The Red Violin).  We got to see the softer Sam in 1993’s “Amos & Andrew” where he played Andrew Sterling, a successful black urbanite writer who buys a vacation home in a small New England resort town.  One night, the local constabulary mistakes him for a burglar.  Fortunately, the cop in the movie had slightly more sense than the one who confronted Professor Gates.  The movie cop knew exactly what kind of mess he’d just made.

We all know what came next in our real-life version.  Subsequent right-wing noisemakers, when not honking the ‘behaved stupidly’ horn, are trying to paint this as a classic case of intellectual snob vs. the working class civil servant, (Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Gates of Political Distraction,” July 29). They would have us believe the only racist in the room was Professor Gates.  In a phantasmagorical role reversal, the neo-cons attempt to convince us it’s not a race issue at all.  The real issue is one of the downtrodden, long-suffering police officer just trying to do his job, which should not include taking verbal abuse from an arrogant, limousine liberal.  Really, now.  Let’s take a quick inventory of reality, shall we?

Professor Gates has:

• A valid driver’s license
• A Harvard ID
• A set of keys that fit the doors
• Dark skin
• A police officer in his house making absurd accusations
• A perfectly good reason for being a little pissed right now

Officer Crowley has

• A gun, handcuffs, pepper spray, and a big stick
• A small army just a radio call away
• A badge giving him the right to arrest and detain anyone he deems troublesome
• The benefit of being white in a notoriously racist nation
• A possible chip on his shoulder and some heightened anxiety due to the fact than an angry black man is yelling at him

America has

• Cops who go on bizarre power trips on routine traffic stops
• Crowd ‘management’ officers in full-blown riot gear who shoot female lawyers in the head with rubber bullets then laugh about it later
• Deputies who beat the crap out of teenaged girls simply for being petulant
• Law enforcement professionals who will shoot a restrained suspect in the back

Who is more likely to have the advantage?  The angry black man, or a white man in a blue uniform with a big stick?  We don’t have to page too far back into our collective consciousness to find the answer. 

If that’s not enough to prove it’s a race issue, what about this: Would the story have landed above the fold in any pissant newspaper if it involved two white guys?  No.  Would we have heard about a black officer questioning a white professor?  No, because it’s not interesting when a white man breaks into his own home.  In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that, upon seeing the homeowners ID, a police officer might even HELP a white man get back into his own house.   

Of course this is a race issue, people.  For pete’s sake.

In a better world, hard-working police officers could protect us without being shot at and killed by crazy people.  In a more perfect union, Professor Gates would have been a bit more rational and understanding.  He would’ve provided his documents and calmly invited the officer to vacate the premises.  First thing in the morning he would have called his attorney, filed a complaint at the Mayor’s office, and composed a letter to the editor of every local news outlet with carbon copies going to the ACLU and NAACP.  Then he would have made big money on the lecture circuit and maybe even been asked to head a new federal commission for improved race relations.  Heaven forbid, a good teacher might turn this into an educational opportunity…

Sadly, having a black man in the white house for a few months is not going to erase more than 200 years of bigotry and ignorance.  We all still have a lot of growing up to do.

It was an intricately die-cut door hanger sporting a crazy cartoon test tube with goony glasses and a jet pack inexplicably spewing pink bubbles all over saying, “Calling All Funologists!” I immediately licked my mental thumb and started working through the calendar wondering if one of my nephews was having some party or event I’d forgotten about.  Nope.  Then I noticed what looked like a logo tucked in the lower right corner.  This event was being put on by something called Group’s Power Lab.  There, in 10-point Comic Sans nestled below the company name and inside a Jimmy Neutron-style cartoon molecule, was the real meat of the thing: “Discovering Jesus’ Miraculous Power.”  Did our favorite Jewish carpenter load all of his magic into a pink cartoon jet pack?  I would have been less surprised to see Him as Felix the Cat, (“…Whenever He gets in a fix He reaches into His bag of tricks!”).

We turn over the giddy piece of paper thrill to find that we’re being told to “Plug into Jesus’ power at Power Lab!”  [Huh?]  Are we somehow trying to equate Jesus with science?  The invitation goes on to tell me where the adventure is, when the fun takes place, the time the excitement will begin, and who I can call if I want to join my new friends!  I fully expect to find Mr. Wizard in a cassock and collar changing a beaker of water into wine while climbing a rock wall at Gymboree. 

We graphic artists, typically being a most unwilling sidecar to the marketing world, understand the manipulation factor of good advertising.  I’m disgusted that this outfit and the sponsoring church might feel justified in disguising their indoctrination sessions as some kind of metaphysical adventure.  And it’s not only because I don’t espouse their belief system.  They’re clearly desperate to engage today’s youth and feel they can’t do it by honest means.  Hey, let’s ensnare overwrought mothers with this promise of an exciting week at camp for their little carpet monkeys.  By the time they realize it’s a religion thing, the kids will already have a cup of the Kool-aid in their sticky fists.  Perfect!  Let’s turn Jesus’ completely legitimate and beautiful message of love and compassion into a chocolaty river to be sucked down by all the little Augustus Gloops in the neighborhood.  It’s reprehensible.

All but the most hard-boiled of us acknowledge some sense of a larger/higher power.  I don’t necessarily believe in God, but I believe in Good.  If being made ‘in God’s image’ is true, then it seems we all have the ultimate power for goodness in us.  I believe that the only real evil is the hatred, malice and violence of which we are all capable.  I believe that having a God or a Devil nearby gives us permission to attribute or blame our actions on some will other than our own. 

Oddly, my beliefs along these lines are considered heresy by most Western standards of religion.  But this strange piece of chicanery hanging on my doorknob and portraying God as a wacky bubbling jet pack is perfectly okay.

Post Script:  A little extra sleuthing turned up this super-peppy audio companion piece: “Power In The Blood!” – yep, really.  “There is power-POWER, power-POWER, wonder-working power in the bloooood of the laaaamb!”  If I didn’t know better, I’d be thinking this outfit might be working for the Other Guy.

Because I have a life, a career, and a social calendar… Because I see no particular need to set my clock to that of a major entertainment distributorship… Because there are so many more important choices to make every day when I roll out of bed, the very last thing on my mind is to tell Columbia House not to send me their absurd “Director’s Selection” every month.

First of all, the Director of WHAT? Director in Charge of Perpetuating Banal and Utterly Mindless Pop Culture? Director of Lobotomies with a Hand Shovel? The Director of Half-Eaten Twinkies Floating in Bong Water? The Director of FEMA Who Used to Raise Thoroughbred Horses but Decided It Would Be Fun to Manage Federal Emergencies Instead? Frankly, any of them would be an improvement over the current selection tsar.

Oddly enough, they have only themselves to blame for my gas. They set the bar too high. I recall a time when the aforementioned purveyor of mediocrity would at least let you assign yourself to a category. When I got my 13 free CDs, they at least let me tell them “I’m kind of a jazz girl.” I knew there were idiots at the switch whenever the current spit bubble from Kenny G arrived at my door, but the rest of the time I could generally count on something tolerable showing up if I’d happened to have missed my No Thanks window. Let me tell you, friend: No such categorization buffer exists in the DVD department.

Some brilliant MBA obviously walked into Columbia House and said, “Hey, options are bad and they cost you money!” Or maybe it was “consumers don’t really know what they like, so we need to tell them!” Well, I know precisely what I like, and it’s the opposite of Spiderman. The movies I enjoy wouldn’t even share a theater zip code with American Wedding (the desperate attempt at a follow-up to the absurd American Pie). Other shit stains include that crazed monkey boy Tom Cruise in Collateral, Tom again in The Last Samurai, and the even bigger monkey boy Keanu Reeves in a weird thing called Constantine. I couldn’t even get beyond the menu screen on that one. The arrival of each was about as welcome as salmonella poisoning on Christmas.

For as bad as they were, I’m afraid none of them prepared me for the half-plucked turkey I found rotting in my mailbox today: Talladega Nights. Don’t get me wrong! Nobody does Big, Stupid, Hairy White Guy like Will Ferrell. But it’s clinically proven impossible to endure 121 minutes of it. A ten-minute comedy sketch with Will in a cheerleader outfit is the most normal humans can take. Getting beyond that qualifies you for any number of jobs at the White House, because your tolerance for idiocy is clearly unnatural.

Considering a possible run for office, I decided to watch. It’s hard to pinpoint what was so gut-wrenchingly bad. The flavor of awfulness was pervasive, and had an oscillating quality to it much like sitting next to your smelliest uncle on a hot day with his Wal-Mart fan wafting toxic body odor into your nose and eyes with its perky little plastic flags a-fluttering, all impervious to the stench that’s slowly removing your facial flesh. In fact, it was probably much like the smell to be found on any summer day in Talladega.

Now don’t fool yourself for one minute into thinking that this bleeding heart liberal simply resents the chronic stereotyping of lower-middle class America as stupid, shallow, and feckless. On the contrary! I LOVE it. Especially when they’re all polling republican. I’m going to start getting legislation in place to move elections to mid July, and all my problems are over! Nope. I say, “Gentlemen, start your engines and bring out the Girls Gone Wild,” because it’s the best way to keep all y’all in one place for when Iran finally sends that nuke over here. I don’t think bin Laden will target us wine-slurpers in Sonoma. He wants you red, white, and blue-blooded screaming assholes getting a chubby watching cars drive around in circles real fast burning up all of his oil. But I digress…

Ricky Bobby is a carbon copy of every other Will Farrell character we’ve ever seen. John C. Reilly does what he does best, which is to play the hapless second fiddle. Unfortunately for Farrell, the second fiddle frequently upstaged the top banana. There were only two factors that saved this DVD from the doom of my microwave: The goofy quotes on the box praising the movie (“America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, bad-ass speed.” — Eleanor Roosevelt), and Sacha Baron Cohen as the Euro-trash Formula One driver bent on proving his alternative view of superiority. I admit to being disappointed at finding my hero in this retched movie, but then it began to make sense… in a sick, witty, and entirely Sacha B. Cohen way, it all made sense. But I doubt it’s what the producers had in mind.

So I hate Columbia House because it propagates the lowest common denominator of taste. It kicks the witty, intellectual kid in the balls while clumsily fingering the cheerleader’s panties. Columbia House takes the absolute worst aspects of American “culture” and splashes it in your lap with some salsa and chips.

But what the hell do you expect from people who give you stuff for FREE? Shut up and eat your Fritos.