Book Review: Calling Dr. Laura by Nicole J Georges
I really like Nicole J Georges’ work, and Calling Dr Laura is no exception. Read it! It’s gigantic (260 pages), tells a solid story, and has awesome art (lots of detail).
The narrative contains all kinds of goodness: queerness, lying parents, stress, relationships, chickens, histories, Portland Oregon, fortune telling, dogs, veganism. . . If you like her other work, you’ll like this book. If you like any of the topics I just mentioned, you’ll probably like this book.
I was looking at the amazon reviews of this book, and it looks like a lot of the crappier reviews were from people who got the book for free from the Vine program. I guess that’s what happens when you give a kind of niche (queer, vegan, artistic) book to a flatly mainstream audience that doesn’t really have any interest in it?
Her etsy shop’s on vacation right now til mid-march, but here’s the link
Find the book at a library near you
Fun a Day, Day 17
The saga continues!
Today I arrived in Oakland a bit early for a dental appointment (totally awesome dentist who actually takes my crappy insurance! She’s worth the BART ride!). To pass the time, I wandered through Chinatown, stopping first into Layonna for some fake meat, and then into Park Grocery Liquors at 828 Franklin Street for a scratcher ticket. The thing about Park Grocery Liquors, is that it’s not really a grocery store. But neither is it a liquor store. Rather, the best that I can describe it, is as a gambling outpost. Upon passing through the doors, I was faced with a dark store interior that was inhabited by maybe 10 elderly men who were furiously gambling with one another and on their owns. Only one joined me at the scratcher machines along the wall– the others filled out those fill-in-the-bubble forms and gambled around a table
The ticket that I purchased– the “Dragon’s Fortune,” did not bring me a fortune. But I’ll live.
The poverty Gourmet: Dessert– Texas Apple Pie
Remember the notion of a pie?
The classic “Dennis The Menace” pie cooling on the window, the “We Help Mommy” pie that Martha and Bobby helped prepare for Daddy, the perfectly good pie smashed into the face of a comic villain?
I was not thinking of those little cultural gems today when I threw together the beauty below. Rather, I was thinking about the sack of half-bad apples that i bought at the farmers market last Sunday for less than a dollar, and the half- cup of brown sugar that was languishing in the kitchen cupboard, the fact that we magically still had (whole wheat) flour left, even after my recent sourdough-making bonanza, and my insatiable sweet tooth.
The whole thing probably cost around $2 to make. OMG dessert for, like, two whole days!
Here is how I did it:
(note: an even cheaper, “dinner pie” version of this recipe can be made but cutting the sugar in the apple mixture and by eliminating it in the crust)
1. Get 6-or-so elderly apples. Skin and thinly slice them.
2. Put the apple slices, a few squirts of lemon juice, some shakes of cinnamon, a squirt of vanilla, and maybe 1/4 cup of brown sugar in a covered sauce pan and simmer on low. Stir occasionally, and watch as your crisp fruits wither into syrupy cinnamon-y goodness. Try not to eat too much of it before it reaches the pie. By the way, those recipes that call for the addition of butter or cornstarch– B.S. The apples and sugar make their own syrupy glop.
3. while the apples are cooking, put maybe 2 cups of flour, a few teaspoons of sugar, some cinnamon, a couple small chunks of margarine, and a splash of oil (hey, it’s all about economy here!) into a mixing bowl (if you are feeling rich, add more sugar and more oil). Mix it with your hands ’til it’s crumbly, and then add water until it resembles pie crust dough.
4. split the dough in half and make the crust-bottom with one part, and the crust top with the other. I bake mine before putting the filling in. Some people do not. Be sure to choose excellent shapes for the top. I chose Texas and circles and rings. After Assembling the pie, sprinkle some more of the brown sugar on top. It will crystallize and you can feel all decadent.
5. Photograph, let cool, and eat.
crumbs or diamonds?
Lately I find myself wanting to subscribe to magazines the same way that I often want to slink through the aisles of Thrift Town or pour through the Google results repeatedly for “vegan fair-trade shoes.” These drives may be shallow, but they pass the time.
At work I linger on the pages of Vogue Paris, Interview, Interior Design and Domus. I save subscription cards and imagine the thick, glossy pages heaping toward me as I unlock my mailbox. I imagine the bulk of them slick under my arm as I carry them up the stairs to my apartment, and the smell from between the pages as I remove them from their plastic wrappers.
I would be lying if I said that I didn’t consider going to fashion school when i was nearing the end of high school. I even took an all-about-fashion elective class when completing my 12th grade credits. But i would also be lying if I said that I felt comfortable attending the FIDM prospective student faire/fashion show when I was seventeen. Aside from a girl with a wild gauzy skirt, dark eyemake-up, and a jungle of brownish red curls (who i could not stop staring at), I was one of the only ones there who was not clad in the Clothestime fads of the time.
This blog is an attempt to chronicle what has happened since then, and how being a vegan, feminist, fair-trade-lovin’, broke-ass queer student geek translates into the world of paying attention to and appreciating things happening in fashion– both mainstream and gutter. I plan to post recipes, art ideas, stuff I made, dessert i baked, and things that I like.