My day started with a 6:10 am flight from Spokane, WA to Portland, OR. Joining me on the journey was Doris Lessing in the form of her novel, The Cleft, a chilling post-modern myth of human origin mixed in with a deft commentary on the politics of gender.
After an afternoon coffee with Ben, a fellow vegan with a penchant for adventures like train hopping, hitchhiking and vasectomy, I met up with a group of friends for my self-organized birthday party at the Blue Moose Cafe.
The Mediterranean chick pea soup (vegan with a surprisingly creamy broth) came with two slices of 21-grain bread. We spent almost 30 minutes attempting to name 21-grains that we knew. We fell short even after the server informed us that the “21-grains” included some seeds. The full list of grains are as follows:
- whole wheat
- cracked wheat
- flax
- sunflower
- oats
- pumpkin seeds
- millet
- rye
- brown rice
- triticale
- barley
- sesame
- black sesame
- amaranth
- buckwheat
- spelt
- blue cornmeal
- yellow corn
- kamut
- poppy seeds
- quinoa (pronounced in Swedish as “Queer Noah”
- sorghum
Which proves that it should have been called 22-grain & seed bread. After the meal (they even served popcorn with nutritional yeast!) they served us a quadruple layer double chocolate vegan cake (that apparently took four hours to create). Can you say insulin shock? But what a way to go.
After the meal, a friend, Jonmark and I traveled in his car, the HMS Uranus U-Probe, to Cinetopia. I cannot properly describe the wonders of this cinema–perhaps the best cinema in the US. Check out the site to see why.
Jonmark took me out to see Coraline 3D, a new animated feature length film in gorgeous 3D about a little girl (Dakota Fanning) that gets trapped in a house diabolically designed to seduce her with slick promises of a better life while the evil force within seeks to suck the life out of her. (It sort of reminded me of the Homo No Mo Halfway House).
What a strange, wonderful and awful mixed bag. The film displayed amazing technical and creative genius, (those massive geriatric boobs will haunt and delight me for a long time,) but I hated the “made for video game” moments. (You found one eye, Coraline. Only two more left! But look out for the evil mother.)
And that whole magical negro cat written in to save the day felt outright offensive especially when it came to the critical moment when the little white girl throws the mangy wise black cat (Keith David) with its c0ol-jazz, Uncle Remus drawl at the witch woman (Teri Hatcher) in order to escape and then later offers a weak, “sorry about that” with the inference, “hey, I was the important one to save here , right?”
And what is up with the mixed-race boy with the name Wybie, as in “Why be born?” which is how he introduces himself to Coraline! Such bizarre racist and stereotypical gunk mixed in with stunningly original and riveting characters and animation. It could have been an absolutely brilliant movie, but sadly failed to deliver.
Off to bed with dreams of Lessing’s Clefts and Squirts (women and men) and with the hope that tomorrow I get to once more see the film Låt den rätte komma in, (Let the Right One In), which is still playing here in Portland at the cheap movie theater (only $3!) This Swedish romantic, coming of age horror film set in the 1970’s Swedish winter is by far the best vampire movie I have seen in years.
Peterson Toscano's A Musing 
Vasectomy?! Gosh, you have an interesting sense of adventure!
The secret to that chickpea soup is lemon juice. Some friends of mine made it once using a recipe, and it came out pretty bluhhhh…but I stuck it out for a good six spoonfuls before it dawned on me that what was missing was lemon juice. My friends thought I was off my rocker, but I persisted in my quest to add lemon juice to the soup and…sure enough, as soon as we got some, it was PERFECT. 🙂
Lemon juice is also the magic ingredient for replacing buttermilk, I think. I haven’t tried this in a long time, but I seem to recall that something like a 1:4 proportion of lemon juice to soymilk works for anything you’d use buttermilk in.
Peterson–
Cracked wheat and Whole Wheat are both
WHEAT you silly goose.
Alivia
You are gay, dont talk about boobs like that! (I couldnt help laughing though). And, nutritional yeast??! Yeah, only in America i think., never heared of that one before…Its a first!!
HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY!!!!
That’s a hell of a lot of grains and seeds! And the cake just demonstrates something I have to remind myself of–that just because it’s healthful doesn’t mean you can eat lots all the time.
I’m glad I didn’t go see Coraline now. Several of my friends and co-workers liked it, but it just didn’t appeal to me.
Peterson! What is this? Was your birthday on the 18th? If so, then we share the date. This year was the BIG 5-0 for me. I took the day off, took a morning walk through one of our local wetland preserves (We live north of Seattle.), thanked God for the gracious fly-overs of a bald eagle and two great blue herons, then off to lunch where I ate everything that is forbidden to me all the rest of the year (Except the week between Christmas and New Year’s.).
Happy Birthday!
Heya Peterson,
I took my two youngest to see Coraline, and I was sadly disapointed.
The book was soooo much better. I had to order it because my ten yo refuses to see the movie before reading the book.
Wybie was not even in the book. The girl pretty much gets through and catches the witchy hand herself, with her very own smarts. No male rescurer.