The Age of Odd: A Sufjan Stevens Production

I went to see Sufjan Stevens last week, and promptly started composing a review the next day, but as usual, it's taken a week to shape it into a post. Here 'tis:

Last night, I saw Sufjan Stevens, and it nearly gave me a seizure.
I do not mean a seizure of folky sweetness. I mean that the production value- flashing lights, day-glo tape striped clothing, and trippy outerspace-themed multimedia nearly brought on an epileptic fit. (Apologies to people with epilepsy. I had an epileptic dog once.) This is not your grandpa's Sufjan Stevens. In fact, Grandpa would have most certainly had a stroke at last night's concert.

Critics have mostly lauded Stevens' electronic-laden "Age of Adz," though as a long-suffering fan, I was a bit disappointed. But nothing could have prepared me for the stage show at the Beacon Theater. I hadn't had the occasion or spare cash to see Sufjan with his full band in the past. I saw him play a Hurricane Katrina benefit solo in 2005, the year "Illinois" was released. I remember thinking it was a little too poppy, but there were still enough folk gems to placate me. Alternating between guitar and banjo, Sufjan held the Bowery Ballroom captive with his haunting voice. No one dared to speak for the entire set, and the cadence of his voice carried me away to the sublime regions of the mind.

The next time I saw Sufjan, he was playing a few songs at a PEN benefit, and talking about writing. It was perhaps two or three years ago. He played the piano, and graced us with a song that was later released on the "All Delighted People" EP, "The Owl and the Tanager." The whole night was beyond low-key. So I was not expecting a huge spectacle last night. Before the show, my husband joked that Sufjan was going to descend from a pod and there would be flames shooting out. "That's not Sufjan's style at all!" I said. Then later a pod did descend from the ceiling, and there were flames projected on a scrim in front of the band.

They started out playing a noisy version of "Seven Swans." I was on board. Then they launched into "Too Much" from "Adz." The backup girls thrashed and gyrated while speeded up videos of people dancing, posing and removing their jackets were projected on a gigantic screen behind them. It was indeed too much for me. As the bass thrummed, audience members looked at each other with the question "WTF?" rising from their heads. I too was extremely baffled. Was is meant to be ironic, or in earnest? Should I be laughing or storming out of the theater in horror? The band were all wearing day-glo stripes of tape on their clothing, along with bits of silver lame. Sufjan had sequined bandannas and glow necklaces hanging from his odd metallic trousers. My first reaction was that it was the most awful, steaming pile of artistic self-indulgence I'd ever witnessed, but fortunately Stevens at least offered an explanation for his strange theatrics. "The Age of Adz" takes its title, album art, and inspiration from Royal Robertson, folk artist and self-proclaimed prophet. It's easy to see why Stevens was attracted to Robertson's story- his claims of visions, UFO encounters, and reclusive descent into madness are pure melodramatic fodder, and Stevens may indeed see something of himself in this figure.

Sufjan, while always displaying a predilection for certain musical elements (the banjo, jingle bells, and twinkling flutes for example), has been quite changeable throughout his musical career, preferring to chase lofty projects and wrap each album in a concept. This is Stevens' grand Ziggy Stardust space musical, his Bob Dylan-Newport Folk Festival moment, and maybe someday we'll celebrate it. Personally, I tend to think Sufjan is at his best when he's not trying to convey some grand ideal. Some of my favorite songs are on "The Avalanche," an album of unused material from the "Illinois" sessions, and I still listen to "A Sun Came" from time to time. I also adored "All Delighted People" from the moment I got my NPR first listen. The title track and the psychedelic jam "Djohariah" are a perfect example of what the artist can do with a big recording budget, though there are still those comforting folky melodies to offset the big productions. I expected "Adz" to build on the EP, but the two are totally unrelated. Sufjan played two of the softer tracks from it as acoustic buffer between the electric hullabaloo, but he played perhaps nine of the eleven tracks on "Adz." I sat through it, including the interminable closing number "Impossible Soul," in which Sufjan joined his dancers for a lengthy routine, and beach balls, balloons, and confetti hailed down on the audience.

I took a desperately needed bathroom break, and when I returned, Sufjan and his band returned to the stage in street clothes. He played a rousing "Chicago," then pared down the band and played "Concerning the UFO Sightings...," "To Be Alone With You," "Casimir Pulaski Day," and finally closed with "John Wayne Gacy," unquestionably the most beautiful song ever written about a serial killer. As Sufjan played and sang alone onstage, I wept silently in gratitude. It was what I'd really wanted the whole time. Few performers are as gifted solo as they are with a band, but Stevens knows how to inhabit a big venue and make it feel intimate. Stripped down and spare, his quavering voice conveys a stunning range of emotion. I was left with the ultimate impression that the glittery "Adz" show that preceded the encore only served to demonstrate how unnecessary it all was. I love when Sufjan builds up a huge sound, from "A Winner Needs a Wand," to the noisy "Vesuvius" on "Adz," but I really think he's at his best when he lets his voice become the primary instrument. I suffer the musical doodlings because I love his sense of melody and the ingenuity of his lyrics. One can only hope that the artist will reverse directions in his next effort. Perhaps an a capella album might be an appropriate turn?

Reasons Not to Make Your Own Pierogis

I decided I was going to get creative in the kitchen tonight and make my own pierogis. I should have just gone straight to freezer aisle, but I had already looked up a recipe for "pumpkin sage pierogis," and I decided I could pull it off.

Maybe I just wanted to torture myself. I'm not remotely skilled in the kitchen, unless you count eating as a kitchen skill. I grew up on convenience food. Hamburger Helper, Kid Cuisine, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and microwaveable sliced ham were the staples of my diet. One of my favorite fresh-from-the-freezer meals involved pillowy soft Mrs. T's pierogis, which my dad would sautee with diced onions. I hated the accompanying kielbasa, with its disgusting texture and thick skin, but it was a small price to pay for the chance to eat pierogis. I always wondered about Mrs. T. Was she Mr. T's wife?

After having a go at making pierogis myself, I'm pretty certain she is. First of all, it takes a lot of tough love to coax a pierogi out of a feisty piece of dough. Secondly, I pitied myself for being such a fool. And lastly, paiiiiin.

The first and most difficult step is making the dough. I was halving the recipe, but I was on the phone at the time I was mixing together the batter, so I added two eggs instead of one. Naturally, I am unable to talk and follow a recipe at the same time. It's nearly as difficult as walking and chewing gum, which is why I never chew gum. Anyway, I figured I could balance it out with a little extra flour. The dough took on a dough-like consistency eventually and I left it to set in the fridge for half an hour.

Then I mixed the filling, remembering to halve the canned pumpkin but forgetting to halve the ricotta cheese. So I added the full measure of canned pumpkin, sage, and nutmeg so the filling would taste right. Unfortunately, I now have a container in my refrigerator filled with a canned pumpkin/ricotta cheese mixture that I'm not sure will work with anything else. (And doesn't it sound revolting?)

Now it was time for the fun to begin. I went to roll out the dough, but the dough refused to be rolled. When I removed the rolling pin, the circle of dough shrunk back to its original size like one of those tiny popcorn shirts after you remove it from your body. (Does anyone remember those? I ended up with two of them, but they looked terrible on.) Yes, I may have invented their food equivalent. My dough stubbornly refused to be rolled. After much wrangling and coaxing, I got a piece rolled as thin as I could possibly manage and began cutting out dough circles with a coffee mug. My hands shook as I spooned the filling into my first pierogi. And... it started leaking through a hole I had somehow created in the dough. Clearly this one wasn't going to work out. I chucked it and started afresh. The same thing happened with the next one, but the hole wasn't so bad, so I decided to patch it with a dough band-aid and keep going.

I can't really describe what utter agony it is to fill a pierogi. Sticky dough, slippery pumpkin-ricotta cheese mix... It's just a bad combination. The filling kept squirting out of the sides when I tried to pinch the dough together. But my patience was gone, so I just sealed them up the best I could and moved forward. The recipe I was using was supposed to yield 30, but I ended up with 21 (to be fair, I threw away two plus a little excess dough that could have been one or two more). My pierogis were clearly too thick, but I had been cooking for two hours already and my food was still raw, so I put the pot of water on.



The recipe told me to boil the pierogis ten at a time. I would purportedly know the pierogis were done when they floated to the top, whereupon I was to remove them with a slotted spoon and run them under cold water in a colander. I looked into the pot. My pierogis were like bricks. After about five minutes, I was seriously doubting that any would float to the surface. But after a few more minutes, they began to bob up ever so slightly, one by one. It was actually the most fun part of the whole experience, a bit like magic. The pierogis just seemed to know when they were ready to come out. And they did come out, albeit deformed and with a pockmarked surface.



The last step in this whole circus, after the pierogis dry out a bit, is to sautee them. I put aside enough for my very belated dinner and froze the rest. As the butter melted in the pan, it occurred to me that two and a half hours later, I was at the very same step in the cooking process that I would have been if I had just bought a box of Mrs. T's.



Tomorrow, I'll have the joy of washing half of my cookware and peeling bits of dried dough off of the ceiling, but for now, I just want to enjoy my food. Despite the thickness of the dough, the pierogis actually tasted pretty good. Worth three hours of labor, not including dishes, though? Never.

The thing is, I'll probably forget all about this awful ordeal and attempt it again in a couple of months. Because I like... paaiiin.

Emotional Eating

The hubs is gone out for his last tour on the high seas (er, Delaware River), and I've discovered the perfect food to replace him. I've gone through a heavy rotation of favorite treats, but when my sister was visiting the last time, we had some alfajores. She lived in Argentina for a bit and really wanted to recreate that tasty treat. Unfortunately the alfajores are not so authentic at the MarieBelle Cacao Bar, but since then, I've noticed the Argentinian cookie popping up everywhere around the city.

For those of you who have never heard of an alfajor, it's a sandwich cookie filled with dulce de leche. There can be many different kinds. Here's a visual to get you salivating.



At dinner on Friday night, the hubs and I each enjoyed an alfajor dipped in chocolate. Today at lunch, I found alfajores at an espresso bar two blocks away from the office, these ones with shredded coconut accompanying the dulce de leche inside, and a dusting of powdered sugar on the outside. It's like a whoopie pie, only about ten times better. Note that the dulce de leche ought to be thick and goopy.

Move over, tiny cupcakes, this cookie looks like it's poised to take over this city. Or at least my pantry.

The One With the Dog and the Dental Floss

This past weekend, I was visiting my sister in Chicago and met the two greyhounds she has adopted. The presence of the dogs reminded us of the hijinks of the old family dog, and when we remember her, we always eventually get back to one story; the consummate stupid dog story. It's the best dog story I have, and I've actually had it copywrighted so that nobody in the film industry will steal this brilliant gem of a true story.

When I was growing up, our family had a yellow labrador mix named Sandi. She was mostly a gentle and stupid animal, but when it came to filching food, this dog was a pro. There used to be a picture in the guest room of my grandparents' house of myself and my cousins, aged about 2-4, sitting by the lakeshore with our lunches on paper plates in our laps. Sandi is in front of us, eating my sandwich off of my plate. On another occasion, my father famously left two apple pies to cool on the kitchen counter while we went out to dinner, only to find two empty pie pans on the floor with nary a crumb when we returned.

But this is just to set up my hilarious dog story. Allow me to digress gently and work my way back to it in due time.

At our elementary school, we had a yearly event called Career Day. I can't actually remember any of the presenters, save for one. One girl in my class had a father who was a dentist, and he came every year. The first and second grade presentations were gentle exhortations to brush and floss and I always thought it was pretty entertaining, but when we got to third grade, the man got serious. I can't remember his real name, but I think it was Woodman or something, because we called him Dr. Woody. I awaited the presentation happily because I knew I was going to get a free toothbrush, but soon Dr. Woody started showing slides of teeth with cavities. The images of rotting teeth grew increasingly gruesome as he explained how cavities are formed, and what happens if they're allowed to get worse and worse. He drew diagrams on the board illustrating tooth decay. Dr. Woody identified the common culprits of tooth damage- sugary beverages. I was scared straight and didn't have so much as a sip of soda for the next two years. But we did get gift bags from Dr. Woody with the usual toothbrush, stickers, and mini container of dental floss.

Either my sister or I must have left Dr. Woody's goody bag on top of a small, child-height table when we got home from school that day. We forgot about it. I could think of nothing else except grotesque images of cavity-ravaged teeth at the time.

After dinner that night, we were all in the sun room when Sandi entered, attempting to hack something up. My mother went over to the wheezing dog and saw something hanging from her mouth that looked like a thread. She started to pull. And pull. The dog had her hackles up and made a kind of peanut-butter-stuck-to-the-roof-of-the-mouth movement with her jaws. My mother kept on pulling at it, as the extracted thread began to accumulate on the floor. She was still pulling, and it was ridiculous. The whole family was rolling with laughter. I wish we had had the video camera rolling at the time so I could watch it again. I know we would have won America's Funniest Home Videos. Unfortunately, those were the days when operating a home video camera still required a good twenty minutes of set-up.

There were at least ten minutes of pulling before the end of the string came up. The dog ran out of the room, relieved. We just looked at the pile of thread on the floor and laughed till we cried. It was an entire mini-roll of dental floss unspooled before us. What became of its container, we never found out.

I'm Pretty Sure the Cat Wants Me Dead

Last year, I thought I'd do a good thing and adopt a kitten. My parents were living in the country and three kittens were orphaned outside of their home. My mother took them into her bathroom and took care of them for several weeks, and when they were old enough, we took one back with us to New York.

Despite having mostly lived indoors, the cat still acts feral. We named her Gypsy because of her spunk (I was reading a book about Gypsy Rose Lee at the time), but she more embodies the spirit of the Romani people (as described in racist European folklore). The hubs has a Bulgarian co-worker named Boris who is always telling little gypsy stories, such as, "At McDonald in Bulgaria, you must pay for the ketchup and mustard packets as well, otherwise Gypsy would make a fortune." Boris also has a story about Gypsies cutting down a live power line to try to steal copper wiring. My cat is more like these characters, always up to zany hijinks.

Gypsy with a plastic bag stuck around her middle

Once, when she was smaller, she escaped through the flimsy divider of my a/c unit, jumping or falling about 15 feet. I couldn't find her for four hours, but luckily a neighbor spotted her and took her in. Gypsy had a slight sprain in her back leg, but that was all. I was probably worse off than she was. She still managed to give the vet technicians hell and had to be restrained in a towel for her examination.

She is not too popular at the vet for this reason. Her first visit to the vet, they went to trim her claws, and she let out the most unearthly wail. The vet's young son was in the room, and he was stuffing his fingers in his ears. The vet was calmly talking over the yowling and I was just laughing hysterically. The last time she visited the vet, to get spayed, she earned a caution label on her chart. They decided to do her surgery earlier than planned because it would be tricky to get her down. That evening, we got a call stating that Gypsy was fine but they'd had to use a little extra tranquilizer and she couldn't really walk yet.

I have unbridled affection for this small animal, despite the fact that she sometimes preys on me. If I leave the bathroom door open, she'll sometimes pounce on my feet and bite them at their boniest part while I'm vulnerable on the toilet. If she happens to be sitting on the shelf above my desk and I walk by her, she'll swipe at me with her claws out. Sometimes she'll tear across the apartment, rear on her back legs, and launch herself at my leg. Even in her affectionate moments she feels compelled to nip and softly scratch me. When I brush her, I wear gloves so I'll still have some skin left on my hands afterward.

Gypsy waiting for some feet to bite

I've suspected the cat may hate me or that she's trying to escape from me, but now I'm wondering if she intends to kill me. Weeks ago, she had knocked a small plastic halogen lamp from its mounting and I just sort of left it where it fell and forgot about it. Yesterday, the hubs smelled burning wood and found that the lamp was on and slowly scorching a spot on the hardwood floor. There's no doubt in my mind that the cat was trying to burn down our apartment. It's only a matter of time before an anvil drops down on my head when I open the front door.

Stuff My Husband Says

I love Seth, but he says some pretty stupid things sometimes. Maybe it's one of the reasons I love him. On the night we met, one of the things he revealed about himself was: "I won third place in the Maryland Junior Duck Stamp Contest." That was his most skillful pick-up line. It turns out the ducks he painted for the contest are very beautiful, and his parents still have the framed painting hanging in the hallway with its third-place ribbon affixed to it. Seth blames the species of duck he painted for being too plain to deserve a postage stamp. Anyway, that's the way the man I love talks. He says whatever comes to the top of his head. Sometimes it doesn't come out well, and it could be construed as offensive, but nobody pays mind to that when the words are coming from such a handsome, earnest face. Or at least I don't.

But sometimes I pretend to. Last night, while sitting on the couch, Seth referred to me as "my sexy pumpkin."

"Do I look round and orange to you?" I faux-whimpered.

"Okay... you're my sexy... gourd?" Seth ventured.

"So you think I'm bumpy?"

"Are gourds bumpy? I don't really know what they look like."

"Well there are many different varieties of gourds, but they can be bumpy, and brown, or green, or orange, or a combination of all of those."

"Well if there are so many different kinds of gourds, there's got to be a fleshy-colored, sexy gourd."

"What constitutes a sexy gourd?"

"You'll know one when you see one," said Seth, making that clicking noise and gun gesture in imitation of a douchebag character in an 80s movie.

Then later on, as we were both about to go to sleep, Seth and I were having a discussion about Fort McHenry.

"Man, why did they always take us there for elementary school field trips? I think I've been there at least five times," I was saying.

"I've been there at least twice," said Seth, "but I only remember going when I was in middle school. The second time was probably because of the rocket... ... ..."

"Rocket club?" I was thinking. Where was this going?

Then suddenly he started talking again. "Honey, I really should go to sleep. My dreams are starting to get mixed in while I'm talking."

We both burst out laughing, and then I shut my mouth and left him to dream peacefully about rockets.

Fall Fashion Post: Jungle of Ugly

It's Fashion Week in the city, and I can't wait for it to be over. Why, you ask? Fashion Week was good to me this year. It provided me with plenty of free booze, cheesecake bites on a stick, and the opportunity to hobnob with the current cast of Project Runway. But truthfully, my favorite thing about Fashion Week is going through pictures of the shows to pick out the most supremely ugly garments, so I can dis/discuss them with friends.

However, since the fashion industry is kind enough to let us know what we're going to be wearing six months from now, I'm proud to present my fall fashion issue, albeit a bit belatedly. Here are my bottom picks for this fall.

Highland Fat Suit, Comme des Garçons

Charles Anastase: Snow-woman Abomination

Charles Anastase: Kidney Transplant

Topshop: Wildebeest chic

Chanel: Chanetland Pony

Isn't this fun? And here's a little preview of what you won't be wearing in Spring 2011!

Betsey Johnson: Traffic Accident