what do foxes say?

since we acquired our own little fox, it seems foxes cross my path all the time. i am quite enamored with this foxy little song by norwegian brothers ylvis. tho' i do know that foxes can growl and yap a bit like a dog. will this be the new gagnam style? i certainly hope so.

tune in and tune out

funny that i read frank bruni's column on how our devices help isolate us from the world on the same day when a facebook friend posted a shockingly racist and downright nasty post about president obama. it was supposedly written by a black journalist, which supposedly made it all better. it didn't. and i hid it from my feed, not wanting my world and my mind poisoned with such absolute vitriol and frankly, utter bullshit (the tea party crap about michelle not loving her country and obama being a communist). it crossed my mind to unfriend that particular friend.

i hide other posts on my feed - graphic pictures of kitties in need of eye medicine and scarred, wounded pitbulls in shelters. i don't want to see those things. i want cute pictures of healthy kitties and cake and scrubbed children on the first day of school and hilarious videos of clever bulldogs that can go get the milk out of the refrigerator. it's this curation (tho' i hate that word) of the content of the world around us that bruni is talking about. we narrow all of the information coming at us down to just what we want to see, rejecting anything that's of a differing opinion or world view than the one we already have.

i think this selecting is something we do instinctively to survive the onslaught of information coming our way. we don't go to facebook or twitter to hear good arguments or have our minds changed about anything, we go to relax, have a chat, check in on what's going on among our friends. it's today's telephone call. my friends or the pages i follow sometimes share something that opens my eyes or causes me to learn or think in a different way (the links below came to me via facebook pages i follow), but mostly, i laugh at wrongly attributed quotes, pithy aphorisms and photos of that poor grumpy cat. it's facebook, after all, not a paris salon in 1913.

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check out these amazing photos of the burning man festival in the nevada desert.

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if libraries are over, why do we keep building spectacular new ones?

maybe they're not so over.

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milk vodka?

wordless wednesday: cat in motion

what's for dinner?

in this age of sharing everything via instagram and facebook and twitter, what's for dinner has become a much more public question. i'll admit to feeling the pressure of it and i only share the good and inspired days in my dinner list group on facebook. but there are a lot of ordinary days in between. and we still have to eat dinner. it's the one meal of the day where we really do try to sit down together. this long, glorious summer, that may have been at 9 or 9:30 in the evening, decidedly southern european times. now that school has started again, we've tried to move it back to 6:30 or 7, but it's not easy.

another thing that makes it hard is all of the competing fads according to which we are supposed to eat. paleo is very big in denmark right now, thanks to very hot and fit chef, thomas rode putting out a paleo cookbook (which i'll admit i plopped down 249kr. ($44) for the day it came out - look at that cover, could you have resisted?). i'm really surprised by all of the cabbage they apparently had at their disposal in the stone age, but hey, i'm game if i get to spend the dinner hour with thomas. but paleo may just be the new name for low carb, as it demonizes wheat and prioritizes meat. it also has a big element of eating local and in season in it, at least in thomas' version. that, i can get on board with, especially in the summer, when we've got an array of produce to work with.

i've long been attracted to the idea of a raw diet, but feel it would simply be too difficult to feed a family on it.  plus, those hard core raw people often look rather thin and sickly. but i do keep threatening to go raw around here for a week, during the height of the summer produce season (right now would be the perfect time). i say threatening because my family is dead set against it. i guess they just don't think bacon would be that good raw.

we have a couple of meals a week without meat. i don't think any of us would ever really like to embrace full on vegetarianism or veganism, but we do think it's environmentally defensible of us to eat less meat and to consider meat to be a smaller part of our meal, rather than the centerpiece. i made a nicoise-inspired salad for dinner on sunday evening and could use one large grilled tuna steak for the three of us, instead of buying three and giving us each a big tuna steak as the centerpiece of our meal. easier on the wallet and on the tuna supply. plus it was actually enough that there were leftovers for another meal the next day. that was thanks to plenty of freshly-dug potatoes, beans from the market, boiled eggs, salad, carrots, cucumber, tomatoes and mozzarella that made up the rest of the salad. the grilled tuna was just the crown on top. and we all felt like we had our fill.

other food fads at the moment in denmark are ny nordisk mad (new nordic food), inspired by michelin star restaurant noma (which was the nr. 1 restaurant in the world in recent years, but fell to nr. 2 on the latest list). it is big on local ingredients, including things like hay and foraged beach detritus, and that has trickled down to the everyday kitchen in the form of a general sense of pride in nordic ingredients (pork, fish, cabbage, grains like rye and barley), tho' it has yet to make a liquid nitrogen unit an everyday kitchen utensil.  fasting a couple of days a week is also big. i have a friend who lost 10 kilos (20-ish pounds) doing that.

i think that underneath the food fads is actually a basic desire to be more conscious about what we eat. if you're following some strict no-carb diet, you have to think about the food you prepare and eat. the industrialization of food has taken us far from thinking about that. we just open up a package, warm it up in the microwave and scarf it down, all without putting much thought into it. but if you're eating raw or vegetarian or new nordic or paleo, you have to put some thought into what fills your basket at the grocery store and what you're making. and maybe at the base of it, we'd all like to do that.

hmm, i wonder what's for dinner tonight?

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great piece in scientific american on women LEGO minifigures.

food for thought

shark burger with guacamole

the first real readings for our MIT food & culture course include a couple of articles from the new york times (one by michael pollan and one by mark bittman), an older piece (from 1970) by margaret mead and an even older (1942) piece from a wartime book called how to cook a wolf by m.f.k. fisher. they lay out a set of food dilemmas, from wartime shortages to a world where there's enough food for all, but we don't make sure that all have enough food to fad diets and general eating anxiety.  and tho' i look upon myself as a considered cook, conscious of such things as the food miles my produce has traveled and whether it contains gene modified grains, to whether the chicken had a good life before it arrived on my table, these articles left me feeling a bit like i'm not doing nearly enough and perhaps i should just pack it in and stop eating altogether.  but then i remember the perfection of south african avocados and sauvignon blanc and i dismiss that thought. you see, since they come from the same timezone as me, they're ok food miles-wise. (that is a prime example of julie logic, by the way.)

humor aside, we're all engaging some sort of logic that suits our purposes when it comes to food. i deserve this chocolate or this glass of wine because i had a hard day. it's ok that those shark steaks are from a porbeagle shark that's on the vulnerable list, because they were caught by nice fishermen from the faroe islands. and man, are they delicious (especially if you chop them up in the food processor, throw in a few spring onions, some bread crumbs and egg and turn them into shark burgers). i can just do with the ordinary milk because the store is out of organic and i don't want to make another stop. or it's ok that my avocados come from the other side of the world because it's in the same timezone as i am. this is how we shrug off the guilt of eating.

because eating has somehow become a guilty pleasure. there's so much to think about:  are the cows that made my milk or this steak producing too much methane and contributing to climate change? were these chickens that laid these eggs crowded in little wire cages, with no possibility of ever going outside? should i choose danish cucumbers, which are grown in big energy-consuming greenhouses or ones from spain that were grown outside, but had to be brought here in a truck? which is more environmentally sustainable? and without strict labeling laws, how can we ever really know the truth about the food that's available on our supermarket shelves? let's face it, they weren't exactly flashing neon lights about all that horse meat they were mixing into various ground meat products earlier in the year.

these questions are some of reasons we wanted to move to the countryside and have our own animals and our own garden, so that we could have a much better idea of where our food comes from. but even that's not enough. unless i special order, i can't buy chicken feed that doesn't contain GMO soybeans. i've taken to buying the whole grains - wheat, corn, barley and oats and mixing it myself, together with seashells for good eggs and for their digestion in general. we're by no means self-sustaining and have yet to have our own pigs, but we feel we're taking steps in the right direction. i'm content to only eat strawberries during the glorious few weeks when they're in season and can be picked in my own garden. but do i go without bacon just because we haven't managed to pull ourselves together and source a few pigs? i'll admit i haven't gone that far. nor would i do without olive oil just because we can't really grow olives in our climate. we're spoiled for food choice. and it just may be our demise.

the readings for our course have, thus far, raised more questions and concerns than they have answered and i'm neither done thinking, nor writing about this. stay tuned.

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brilliant website design and great stories - narratively.

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amazing photo project - strangers together

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i want all the neon signs.

hello there monday morning

our weather has taken an autumnal turn, but it makes for gorgeous mornings. we've had such a good summer (the first one since i've been in denmark), that this year, i don't feel my usual impending sense of doom over the approach of autumn and our dark time of year. that's nice, as autumn was always my favorite, since it so often brought with it new books for new classes and cuddly warm clothes.

the farmers are busy, harvesting the fields. tractors rumble past our house out in the countryside all day long and well after dark. i love the golden stubble and the big bales dotting the landscape.

and the morning fog is wonderful. it lends such a quiet hush to the world and gets the day started at a pace a monday morning brain can comprehend.

happy monday, one and all.

bare breasts and bare souls

on thursday, we held an opening reception for our torso project. around 70 people stopped by to see the results. a friend came by, just as we were leaving, with an australian rotary exchange person in tow and i ended up staying another hour, talking to them and sharing a bottle of australian shiraz. it was, in all estimations, a success.

i still think the plain white torsos give the starkest, most artistic impression. but it's true that they are not autobiography in the same way as the others. the expression we individually chose was as unique as we ourselves are and somehow, seeing them all there, hanging together (they're suspended with wire and hanging on hangers), dismissed some of my earlier concerns about whether or not they are art. hanging there all together, representing some sense of community and fellowship and womanhood, it didn't matter anymore whether they are art or not.

i am one of the few who included a look towards the future in the way i chose to express myself at this moment. the sewn paper garland hanging on the inside is my bucket list. it contains goals both lofty (publish a book) and not-so-lofty (befriend a fox).

many of the others covered theirs in photos of their friends and family. despite the central importance of photography to me, i did not want to use photos on mine. i chose instead drawings of places and things that are important to me (chicago, moscow, copenhagen, macedonia) and cameras. there are a few helleristning, because i love those and find deep meaning in their simple lines.

probably most important are the newspaper words that are underneath - both visible and not visible. mostly in danish, mostly because those are the newspapers i had at hand, but expressing fragments of sentiments like "seeking authenticity" and "can the danes be changed in 5 minutes?" and "abnormal is the new normal" and "men are from mars, women from venus, children from heaven and bush is from a very ugly place filled with fear and punishment." that one i'd been saving for awhile.

as agreed, my birth certificate is there, on the inside and you'd have to know what it looks like in order to find it. mine is painted that same blue - a sort of julie blue - inside and out and it somehow represents a kind of peacefulness to me. i also spritzed it with my favorite perfume of the moment (sisley no. 2), so my torso is even scented. each torso is as unique as can be, expressing something meaningful to each of us, but also transmitting meaning to those who come to look. it is an intimate, personal exhibition, letting all of the imperfections quite literally hang out for all to see, but also presenting a coherent whole somehow. a little window into our individual souls, as expressed on our very bodies. pretty powerful stuff, actually.