Tastee Freeze

This looks like fun, and some of the real bloggers are doing it, so why not?


1. Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly? Gene Kelly. Sang better, too.
2. The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises? Hemingway always wins.
3. Count Basie or Duke Ellington? Ellington.
4. Cats or dogs? Cats, fer sure.
5. Matisse or Picasso? Matisse.
6. Yeats or Eliot? Pass, although I suspect I'd prefer Eliot.
7. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin? Keaton.
8. Flannery O’Connor or John Updike? Pass.
9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca? Pass.
10. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning? de Kooning.
11. The Who or the Stones? Don't listen to either, but I kind of like The Who on principle.
12. Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath? Pass.
13. Trollope or Dickens? Pass.
14. Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald? Everybody loves Billie, but you know what? They're wrong. Ella was a better singer, formally and stylistically. If you don't believe me, watch the Strange Fruit documentary and watch her chop her way through the song that defined her. Painful. A mannerist.
15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? Tolstoy.
16. The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair? Pass.
17. George Balanchine or Martha Graham? Pass.
18. Hot dogs or hamburgers? Blech.
19. Letterman or Leno? Blech.
20. Wilco or Cat Power? Pass. And, shut up.
21. Verdi or Wagner? Verdi, are you kidding? Life's too short.
22. Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe? Hm, tough, but I'd probably go with Grace.
23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash? Johnny Cash, and for the last time, just because I like jazz doesn't mean I'll like bluegrass.
24. Kingsley or Martin Amis? Pass.
25. Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando? Brando, but only by a little. And I know a certain grandmother who likes her some Mitchum, rowr!
26. Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp? Pass.
27. Vermeer or Rembrandt? Rembrandt by a mile.
28. Tchaikovsky or Chopin? Hm, tough. Chopin, I guess.
29. Red wine or white? Red.
30. Noël Coward or Oscar Wilde? Coward.
31. Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity? High Fidelity. GPB was silly.
32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev? I would have said Prokofiev until I heard the Emerson Quartet play Shostakovich. Wow.
33. Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev? Nureyev.
34. Constable or Turner? Turner, but I like Constable too.
35. The Searchers or Rio Bravo? Pass.
36. Comedy or tragedy? Tragedy, I'm afraid.
37. Fall or spring? Spring, as long as I live in New England.
38. Manet or Monet? Monet, and I don't want to hear any snorting about it either.
39. The Sopranos or The Simpsons? Sopranos.
40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin? Wow, hard. Can I say Porter?
41. Joseph Conrad or Henry James? Conrad.
42. Sunset or sunrise? Sunset. Ahhhhhh... the light, the LIGHT!
43. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter? Oh, dammit. Rodgers and Hart, I guess.
44. Mac or PC? So, so, so Mac, for now and forevermore.
45. New York or Los Angeles? New York.
46. Partisan Review or Horizon? Pass.
47. Stax or Motown? Stax, baby.
48. Van Gogh or Gauguin? Van Gogh. Gauguin was not only a lesser painter, but an asshole, too.
49. Steely Dan or Elvis Costello? Steely Dan.
50. Reading a blog or reading a magazine? Blog. Yep, the transformation is complete.
51. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier? Olivier.
52. Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin’ Lovers? Uh... what?
53. Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde? Chinatown.
54. Ghost World or Election? Election. hee...
55. Minimalism or conceptual art? Minimalism.
56. Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny? Bugs, but Daffy has his charms.
57. Modernism or postmodernism? Modernism (wistful sigh)
58. Batman or Spider-Man? Spidey, unless I can specify Adam West.
59. Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams? Pass.
60. Johnson or Boswell? Pass.
61. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf? Pass.
62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show? Dick Van Dyke for sure.
63. An Eames chair or a Noguchi table? Like 'em both, and they're probably equally comfortable to sit on.
64. Out of the Past or Double Indemnity? Pass.
65. The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni? Hm, Marriage I think.
66. Blue or green? Green.
67. A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It? Midsummer Night's Dream. Did you know that "Spot" is Shakespeare's dog?
68. Ballet or opera? Opera.
69. Film or live theater? Film.
70. Acoustic or electric? Jazz? Acoustic, if I really had to choose.
71. North by Northwest or Vertigo? Vertigo.
72. Sargent or Whistler? Whistler.
73. V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera? Pass.
74. The Music Man or Oklahoma? Music Man.
75. Sushi, yes or no? Oh hell yes.
76. The New Yorker under Ross or Shawn? Pass.
77. Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee? Albee.
78. The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove? Huh?
79. Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham? Cunningham. He's such a sweetie, and he hung out with John Cage.
80. Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe? Wright for sure.
81. Diana Krall or Norah Jones? Jones for timbre, Krall for style and craft.
82. Watercolor or pastel? Pastel. Anyone who picks watercolor hasn't seen Redon.
83. Bus or subway? Subway.
84. Stravinsky or Schoenberg? Igor.
85. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter? Smooooove.
86. Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser? Pass.
87. Schubert or Mozart? Schubert.
88. The Fifties or the Twenties? Fifties if I can hang out with musicians or beats.
89. Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick? Huck.
90. Thomas Mann or James Joyce? Oh god, neither, please.
91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins? Hm, tough. Lester I think.
92. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman? Emily.
93. Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill? I feel guilty about it, but I'd have to say Churhill.
94. Liz Phair or Aimee Mann? Pass.
95. Italian or French cooking? What a cruel choice. Can I say Italian by a French chef?
96. Bach on piano or harpsichord? Piano. Dynamic variation is the bomb.
97. Anchovies, yes or no? Yes indeed.
98. Short novels or long ones? Short, but no matter.
99. Swing or bebop? Bebop, definitely.
100. "The Last Judgment" or "The Last Supper"? Pass.

Caterpillars!

I wracked my brain for a solid 45 seconds trying to come up with a cute punny title for this post about caterpillars, and I couldn't, yet I must say my peace. (Or my piece, I don't know which it is...) The exclamation point is all I've got for cuteness this time.

Anyway, we didn't get any cicadas up here, which makes it safe for me to claim that I would have eaten some if only they were around. (I've heard more than once that they taste like "minty shrimp," and I can't decide if that sounds like something good.) Instead of cicadas, we got bucketloads of the decidedly inedible but much less noisy Eastern Tent Caterpillars.

I mean, they are all over the place. The last time I went running I was getting ankle cramps trying to dodge them on the sidewalk until I finally gave up and figured I could always wash the guts off the bottom of my sneakers. For those who are interested, if you get them just right they do make an audible pop -- I know, even with no chitinous exoskeleton, can you believe it? -- and their innerds are bright green and come shooting out one end like toothpaste. (Hm, maybe they are minty after all).

Far more serious than gumming up the tread of my running shoes is the consequence of a serious tent caterpillar infestation: they defoliate certain kinds of trees, which in turn detracts from the autumn leaf color show that New England tourism depends on.

Even more serious than that is the subtle sense of dread the little demons have injected into my lunchtime. In light of the relatively few warm sunny days we get up here in these parts, summertime finds all of us basement-dwellers up blinking our eyes in the sunshine, taking our lunchbreak out on the back lawn of the psychology building. Lately our midday reverie has been punctuated by periodic shrieks and spasms when one of the girls -- I won't say which ones, but it is always one of the girls, so sue me for being sexist -- finds one of the crawlies on her foot/leg/ arm, which, given the season, is as likely as not to be bare. The foot/leg/arm, I mean. Well, I guess the caterpillar is bare, too, if you don't count the fuzz, but they're always bare. You know what I meant.

Now, I like watching girls scream and freak out when they touch something icky as much as anyone, but it does get tiresome while you're trying to eat and converse, and what's worse is that it draws your attention to the ground around you as you check to see if you, also, are about to be crawled upon by a caterpillar. And you are. Once you look around, you come to the unsettling realization that there are hordes of the things crawling through the grass, and they're all headed right toward you. Say you pick a few up ("With your fingers?! Eeeew!") and fling them away. They come back. Say you get up and scout out a new grassy spot with no sign of caterpillars and settle down anew. Three shakes, and they've found you. Inching along, slowly but surely, deterred only by obliteration, like little furry zombies. (And no, that was not an oblique reference to John Kerry, who is certainly not little, nor, as far as I know, furry. I said I wasn't gonna do that kind of thing anymore.)

What all of the preceding is really about is setting up justification for a particularly ugly bit of violence I engaged in recently. Last weekend, I followed Laurie out into her garden to see if she was growing anything I wanted to eat help out, and whaddya know but it's pulsing with the furry black devils. (My god, do you think the phrase "black devils" is going to bring all sorts of creepy white supremicists to the site via Google? I mean, I'd like more traffic and everything but I'm not that desperate. If I were, I'd do much better by dropping in mentions of REAL NUDE GIRLS, etc., don't you think?) Laurie, for what it's worth, makes absolutely the most entertaining girlie gross-out noises I've ever heard. But something about her shrieks brought out the knight in shining armor within, or alternatively, the 12-year-old boy within, and I grabbed a stick and went completely kung-fu on about a zillion caterpillars. No, make that "went completely Tarantino" because there was way more minty green guts than you'll ever see in a kung-fu movie.

It was a foul deed, I'll admit, but don't you see, I HAD to do it. Think of the poor garden vegetables, devoured as Laurie looked on, screaming in distress! Think of the New England tourist economy!





I'm a bad person, aren't I?