The best music you’ve never heard #4: Rhonda Vincent
Set that bluegrass on fire!
Now I know what you’re going to say: Bluegrass is for square dancers, hillbillies and flannel-clad hipsters. Truth be told, as a rule, it’s not one of my favorite genres, but I make the occasional exception for the greats: Ralph Stanley, Chris Thile and the musical queen of the Smokey Mountains, the one and only Miss Dolly Parton.
To my way of thinking, Jolene is one of the greatest heart-broke ballads ever written. Plaintive and gorgeous, it’s musical heaven in my book. So you’ll understand why I was dubious when my better half brought home a CD that included a cover of Dolly’s magnum opus some years ago. I was very skeptical, but lord have mercy, was I wrong.
Backed up by The Rage, Rhonda Vincent puts some serious fire in bluegrass music. Not only does she have a great set of pipes, but she can really play. This is seriously hot stuff. Give a listen.
Is your computer smoking yet? No? Then you don’t have the volume up high enough.
A big thank you to my blog buddy Tom Wisk for motivating me to get back to work with his latest post.
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Think you can handle more musical ramblings? OK, but don’t say I didn’t warn you — it can get a little weird hanging around my iPod.
Oh holy crap, here it comes again (The Slattern’s holiday party playlist!)
I did NOT have musical relations with that disco band
The best music you’ve never heard #1
The best music you’ve never heard #2
The best music you’ve never heard #3
Guilty Pleasures: Spring party mix
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Parents
Just kidding.
The Slattern’s guide to surviving the childrearing years.
Once upon a time, I had a real career. I got up early, put on outfits that came out of dry cleaning bags, showed up somewhere and did reasonably important stuff for which I was fairly well compensated. When I spoke at meetings, colleagues actually listened to what I had to say, and occasionally I even bossed other people around. You may not believe it, but I was corporate, folks.
At that time, the Stephen Covey cult of mind control consulting juggernaut was really taking off. His Seven Habits of Highly Effective People was already a perpetual bestseller, big firms showered him in krugerrands just to come and sip a cup of decaf at their corporate retreats, and we were all so busy realigning our paradigms and trying to find our true north it was a wonder anything at all got done in the workplace.
Behold the onset of the maternal urge.
Via electsister777.
Then quite suddenly, at age 32, the urge to have a baby hit me like a freight train that had skipped its tracks and was careening along an icy road in the middle of nowhere. Just like that, I was done with the nine to five grind.
After 42 weeks of pregnancy I was looking forward not only to tying my own shoes, but also to finally having the time to throw stylish dinner parties, get involved with charitable and good works, and write that murder mystery I’d been planning in my head during countless hours of boring operations meetings, ridiculous team-building exercises and hellish corporate travel. I was staying home, suckers!
There was, of course, one small detail I had overlooked, an unexpected fly in the ointment if you will, namely that taking care of an infant is a 24/7 life commitment that supersedes all other obligations, priorities and desires. Like many first timers, I thought it was all over after labor and delivery, that life would return to normal as soon as our gorgeous agglomeration of DNA found her way into the light of day so that I could dress her in all manner of cute baby things, immediately start making mother-daughter trips to Lord and Taylor and marvel at the self sufficiency and composure that would be our shining light of a daughter. I also expected my stomach to snap back to pre-natal flatness. I think we all know how that turned out.
During the 17 hours of induced labor followed by a C-section, an unidentifiable infection and a stay in the neonatal unit, I got very real very quickly. Lacking as I did close relatives in the area to help in the months and years that followed, I turned to a network of friends in the same situation, and somehow we all made it through. Now, as I look back at the past 18 years, I realize how nice it would have been if someone had offered me some practical advice about raising a child generally, and specifically how to do it without losing your mind. I tried Dr. Spock and Penelope Leach and all the other baby busybodies, but they just made it harder rather than easier, as none seemed ever to have actually raised a child while trying to maintain a marriage, keep the house from becoming a cholera vector point and get rid of that most tenacious of fat, the baby roll.
Against all odds, however, the Little Slattern has turned out magnificently. So it’s possible that I might have some pearls of wisdom to help others just starting down the road of parenthood. Of course it could also be that the I’ve finally found the perfect balance of pharmaceuticals and wine spritzers and this makes me think I’ve got all the answers. Hard to know.
For what it’s worth, then, here are the Slattern’s seven habits of highly effective parents:
1. Be proactive, or better yet be hyperactive. There is absolutely no need to be exhausted. After six cups of coffee and a lunchtime dose of Ritalin you’ll find it’s a breeze to clean the house, make dinner, fold ten loads of laundry and paint the garage all in the time it takes your child to have an afternoon nap! Of course, until the baby is weaned, this is out of the question, so mothers are advised to abandon all hope of accomplishing anything whatsoever until such time as mammaries return to their ornamental rather than utilitarian function. All you dads and nonlactating partners, however, can get with the stimulant program any old time.
2. Accept that this is the beginning of the end of your mind. Outside of the office, you may not have an adult conversation concerning anything other than bowel movements, potty training, preschool admissions, coxsackie virus or whether it’s okay to dose your child with Benadryl before a flight (it is) for a very long time. If you’re a stay at home parent, abandon all hope of interesting adult conversation and be forewarned, you may never finish a sentence again.
3. Put first things first. Babysitters are paid before the mortgage. The child’s orthodontia trumps your crumbling crowns. And in-laws may visit only if they agree to feed your child, put him to bed and wash the dinner dishes while you go out to a movie and a well deserved night of heavy drinking at the local bar. (They should also be told where the cash for bail is kept, or better still, bring their own stash.)
Photo courtesy Bernd Vogel/Bernd Vogel/Corbis via the Guardian UK.
4. Think win-win, and if you can’t do that, learn to accept defeat as a daily occurrence and sleeplessness as your new reality. And since I’m on the subject, folks, I cannot urge you strongly enough to teach your kids to put themselves to sleep, in their own beds, from the earliest possible moment. When I was a child, parents were told to let their babies cry it out, which was hard on everyone and frequently resulted in having to go to plan B, namely rubbing babies’ gums with the whiskey from the highball that was keeping the parent from killing him or herself for being the kind of vile human being who lets a child cry until he either vomits or falls asleep. By the time the Little Slattern was tormenting us with ten wakings a night, there was the miracle of “Ferberizing” and it worked a charm. One night of brief crying followed by briefer comforting, and we were home free. The book has saved more marriages and lives than you can possibly imagine.
5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. Unless you have twins, in which case seek first to survive the day and secondly to hold off cocktail hour until they’re asleep.
6. Synergize, and if that doesn’t work anesthetize. There comes a moment in every parent’s life when it’s all just too much — the middle of a 48 hour bout of diarrhea, or along about the third week of a teething episode for example. In the first year of my daughter’s life, Mr. Slattern frequently returned home from work to find me standing three feet from the front door, holding our child at arm’s length and saying, “Here, take her. Just do it. Take her RIGHT NOW.” Being an obliging sort and possessed of a strong instinct for survival, he would drop his briefcase and coat and take over on the spot, at which point I retreated to the bathroom for a two-hour shower and sob-a-thon followed by a large drink. Not that my child was particularly difficult; she was quite easy as they go, but some days were more challenging than others. As such, it is vitally important to know when to hand over the con to whichever half of the domestic tag team happens to be more capable at the moment.
7. Sharpen the saw, to avoid using it on your spouse or partner. The great Covey is a big believer in taking time to renew your energy and personal resources to maximize workplace productivity. This applies equally to parents. When I was in the trenches, Mr. Slattern frequently paired up with other similarly outdoorsy dads and took the kids camping for several days. This allowed the other grateful moms and me to pursue our own paths to spiritual renewal, by which I mean we convened at one or another of our homes, drank ourselves blind, ate cake for dinner and danced to all our college favorites into the wee hours or until one of the neighbors called the cops. Whether you renew with a crafting binge, a poker night or a vodka-fueled solo dance party, just get the down time and make it count.
“I am in no way crazy and my children ADORE me.”
Erin Patrice O’Brien for The Wall Street Journal
And finally, a word on childrearing styles: Tiger mother or attachment parent?
Hard to say which is worse of course, since each approach is deeply disturbing in its own way. How does anyone have the energy to constantly ride herd over, nag and terrorize her kids as the Tiger Mom recommends? By the same token, I marvel at these women who “breastfeed” their five year olds and “co-sleep” until junior goes off to college. Who’s the needy one here, ladies?
And despite their differing approaches, I’ll bet neither type allows her kids to have have sleepovers. Which is crazy. That’s over twelve hours of free babysitting! Sure you’re expected to reciprocate, but you’re already staying in every night, so what’s the difference? Problem is you’re usually too tired to get up to much, but at least you know you could if you wanted to because your child is occupied and uninterested in you — until her overnight guest tries to take her “special” toy or refuses to share the coveted blue crayon anyway.
In the end, I suppose you’ll chart your own course. I myself chose the Third Way, as modeled by that rock of maternal warmth and stability, Shirley MacLaine. Who says the movies can’t teach us anything?
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Interested in more expert parenting tips? I’ll take your word for it.
Mother of the Year
Mother Knows Best
In Praise of the Bar: Bar cookies for bake sale emergencies
Same old song. Same old story. Let’s hear it all again.
“…I’d rather be dead than sing Satisfaction when I’m 45.”
Pushing 70 and still feelin’ the Satisfaction.
I used to wonder how singers could face running through their big hits night after night, year after year, over and over and over again. You know what I mean, Mick singing Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Bowie busting out Young Americans, or The Beach Boys vamping on Surfin’ Safari. Well OK, I can see why these days The Beach Boys would perform virtually anything in almost any venue. After all, California’s a community property state, and rehab is really fracking expensive. Or so I have heard.
Anyways, I used to think it must just be the money that kept them in the game. How else to explain Bob Dylan doing one nighters for Microsoft or the Drifters showing up at virtually every Holiday Inn lounge in the midwest in any given year? Bills have to be paid, ex-wives subsidized, and entire circulatory systems emptied and replaced, and it all requires boatloads of the ready. For any musician born in the UK before 1980, the dental bills alone would be catastrophic. If you think Keith Richards’ new pearly whites came cheap, think again.
Baby, you’re much too fast.
Courtesy Warner Bros.
It has also crossed my mind that the adoration that rolls in while onstage is enough to entice even the most temperamental artiste — think Prince or Mariah Carey — to accept the inevitability of trotting out Little Red Corvette or whatever schlock Mariah is famous for (I can’t stand all that bleating and warbling so I never listen to her) as the cost of doing business. I once heard Nick Lowe say that when he’s attending a performance and the singer introduces something new from “the upcoming album,” a part of him dies just a little. Too right; you pay your dough and you expect to hear the hits. I mean, who wants to shell out $250 for the thrill of Bruce Springsteen running through his Tom Joad catalogue? Might as well stay home and chase your Quaaludes with Sazeracs while cleaning your ears with steel wool and eating Comet. Same experience. No, I want Bruce dancing on the piano covering Devil with the Blue Dress On and turning Born to Run into the New Jersey version of the goddamned Ring Cycle. I know I am not alone in this.
Though all of the above strike me as plausible, none really offer a completely satisfying explanation of how it is that creative people can bring themselves to repeat the same old songs day in and day out, often over the course of many, many years. (See Mr. Jagger above.) It’s a question that has baffled me for a long time, and recently I was giving it some considerable attention at, as it turns out, an Aimee Mann concert. You see, I have a soft spot for the former Til Tuesday singer, and when she’s in town Mr Slattern and I often make a point of dropping in on her shows. Sure the songs are a bit of a downer, but she herself is actually very funny, so you seldom leave a performance less happy — or more depressed depending on your pharmaceutical balance at the time — than you were when you arrived.
So there we were, hanging with Aimee and her band and about a thousand other people, enjoying the familiar strains of Freeway, and I was again wondering how singers manage to muster the enthusiasm to deliver the same songs ad nauseam without losing their minds or at the very least sliding into a deep creative funk. And that was when, as the say, the light dawned on Marble Head. I realized that like me, Ms. Mann probably never tires of her own work.
Now before you consign me to the scrap heap of failed writers with delusions of adequacy, hear me out. Frequently I find myself trolling around my site looking for something, or more often that not, killing time ’til cocktail hour. I start scrolling backward in time and before I know it I’ve lost two hours flipping through the archives and rereading last year’s posts about troublesome oldsters, the perils of driving in New Jersey ,or noble drunks of our time. It’s the same with my other work — short stories, satirical articles, and such. Make no mistake, I am acutely aware that I am no James Joyce, or even James Patterson for that matter, but somehow it doesn’t bother me all that much. Rather, it’s comforting to wallow in the products of my own mind, rather like trading an itchy bra for a comfortable old t-shirt, plopping down on the sofa and working your way through a bottle of Veuve Cliquot with a straw sliding into your own bed after a couple of weeks on the road.
Of course, I certainly don’t want to be reading this stuff when I’m 60. Although if someone wanted to hear it…..
The Holiday Cookie Swap: You’re kidding me, right?
Recipe: Date Crumbles
In the latest missive from Martha, the Darth Vader of domesticity offers up a bunch of recipes especially for holiday cookie swaps. Putting aside the question of who in her right mind would invite Martha to a cookie party (“How quaint! A chocolate chip cookie! Here, do sample one of my Roasted Pecan, Marzipan and Sea Salt 100% Cocoa Dream Bars. They’re the ones packaged in my homemade Fabergé eggs and sprinkled with edible gold dust!”), let us for a moment focus on the strange notion of a cookie swapping party.
As I understand it, these things require everyone to bring about 50 dozen homemade cookies, festively packaged for the holiday and suitable for gift giving. Attendees then go home with 50 dozen assorted cookies to light up their holiday season and blow out the springs on yet another bathroom scale. Now, I myself have never been invited to one of these dream festivals, nor have I ever considered the possibility of throwing one, even in the midst of a weeklong holiday eggnog bender celebration, but I have it on good authority that these shindigs are fairly common and many people actually enjoy them. Mysterious, isn’t it? So let’s break it down.
Babs and Mandy via http://pyxurz.blogspot.com
Cookie party? Great idea, Babs! Count us in!
I’m guessing of course, but I’d wager this is how it usually starts. A couple of ex-sorority sisters are sitting at the table in a tastefully appointed, 800 square-foot kitchen sipping cinnamon-dusted, decaf, fat-free lattes and tossing around crazy ideas to really pep up the holiday season, when one of them recalls reading about a holiday cookie swapping party in, where else, Martha Stewart Living. This of course is the family-friendly, great-room version of the panelled-basement, Mateus-swilling, wife swapping parties of yesteryear. These days, however, instead of swinging, mom, dad, the kids and the nanny happily mingle while participating in a mid-afternoon sugar orgy and bake-off with alpha status on the cul de sac as first prize. (“OMG, Sally did NOT bring those disgusting Snickerdoodles again?! Last year I gave ours to the cleaning lady, and it was the last time we ever saw her. Just saying…”)
Why would anyone do this during the holidays?
I don’t know about you, but by the second week in December I am red-lining the stress meter. My house is cluttered with decorations and blinking lights that turn a garden variety hangover into a never-ending hallucinogenic nightmare; I have cuts on the soles of my feet from stepping on broken ornament shards; I’ve already gained five pounds from eating the entire, extra large fruitcake I made the day after Thanksgiving; and my credit cards are smoking. At this point I long for three things: clear surfaces, a stomach pump and a double martini after breakfast. Seems to me a holiday vodka swapping party would actually make sense at a time like this. How come nobody throws those?
Courtesy frockon.com
What’s the party dress code? The holiday sweater, of course!
If you’re actually going to put in an appearance at one of these binges, you’ll be expected to show up in the Christmas classic, on which you will certainly not want to squander precious gift dollars. So, if you don’t have a novelty sweater of your own (and I sincerely hope you don’t), borrow a Rudolph cardigan, preferably with jingle bells, from Aunt Marge or Chester, that goofy second cousin on your father’s side who keeps a spotless house, is the first to arrive at every family reunion (with his mother) and never fails to remind you that he’s “missing your Christmas card” on December 2nd.
In my opinion, if you’re going to throw a bash during the holiday season, you really should make it formal, but there’s just no way to pull off a black tie cookie party. With the annual request for evening attire, the old man’s mildewy tuxedo gets aired and stretched, and the ladies have a perfectly good excuse to nip into Lord and Taylor for fashionable party shoes, a cocktail dress that will be worn only once, and the Spanxx that are necessary to zip it, but which also require the victim to pee through the trap door in the crotch while hovering over the toilet bowl, because there is no way you’re ever going to get a garment with that much torque back up once you’ve pulled it down and released a cascade of fruitcake-infused gut flab back into the wild, even for the few seconds it takes to have a squeak. You cannot get this kind of merriment while upholstered in Mom jeans and a turtleneck.
What’s on the drinks cart?
Why milk, cider, coffee and tea of course, silly! How this passes for a party in any universe is beyond me. Enough said.
Don’t forget the straw!
Here’s what a “cookie party” at my house would look like:
Me still in my pajamas at seven pm, slumped against the kitchen counter, drinking directly from the bottle of Bushmills I keep under the sink (for emergencies) with half a bowl of cookie dough already working its way from my stomach to my ass. Smoke is rolling out of the oven where the final batch of cookies I need to meet my party “quota” is incinerating (This batch is for YOU, Babs.), and the Wing Hua delivery man is laying on the doorbell waiting for payment on the fifth consecutive dinner delivery of the week. Happy freakin’ holidays.
Nonetheless, since we’re on the subject, and I’m thinking about cookies, I’m going to break my no-more-cooking rule just this once to offer up the recipe for the Slattern’s best cookie, the date crumble. Not only is it festive and delicious, but it also contains dates (iron!) and oatmeal (fiber!), which in my book qualifies this as health food. As an added bonus, these cookies are baked en masse in a pan then cut into bars, thereby saving the baker the aggravation of multiple batches. So if you must attend one of these godawful events, at least you can shine. Just make sure to bring the Slattern’s friend along for company if you want to have any fun at all.
Date Crumbles
(They freeze beautifully, btw)
Date Filling
3 cups pitted dates, chopped (1 lb)
1 cup water
1/3 cup white sugar
Juice of ½ lemon
Crumble
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 cup cool unsalted butter (somewhere between refrigerator and room temp, no margarine or Crisco!)
1 ¾ cups all-purpose flour
1 ½ cups oats (you can use quick cooking oats, but I use old fashioned ones for more texture)
½ teaspoon baking soda
¾ teaspoon salt
Heat the oven to 400°.
In a saucepan, combine the filling ingredients and cook over low heat about 10 to 15 minutes, stirring constantly, until thickened and kind of pasty with chunks. Cool for about 5 minutes.
In large bowl (preferably of an electric mixer, otherwise this bit is exhausting), stir brown sugar and butter together, then add the flour, oats, baking soda and salt and mix until crumbly.
Press half of the crumb mixture evenly in the bottom of pan to form a crust. Spread with filling. Top with remaining crumb mixture and press down lightly.
Bake 25 to 30 minutes or until light brown. Cool 5 minutes in the pan. Run a knife along the edge of the pan, otherwise you’ll have trouble extracting the bars after they cool. Cut into squares or diamonds or rectangles, whichever feels most festive to you.
What’s that? Your sweet tooth is calling? Might as well indulge your masochistic tendencies here, then.
Chocolate crinkles
Bar cookies
Molasses crinkles
The science of the chocolate chip cookie
Kitchen Slattern 
All I want for Christmas is no more “Les Miz”
Dec 19
Posted by WSW
Jack Aubrey as Javert.
Via broadwayworld.com
Well hallelujah, it’s finally here: the epic, groundbreaking, life-changing movie version of Les Misérables. Yup, on Christmas Day we can all run off to the local movie palace to lose ourselves in three hours of emotional torment, armed conflict and theatrical scenery chewing, the like of which, we are told, has never before been captured on film.
Of course, those of us who are celebrating with our in-laws can experience all of the above (as well as the annual battle for the drumstick) live and in person from the comfort of our favorite barcalounger. This scenario offers the added bonus of support from the affable Mssrs. Jameson and Daniels as well as the distraction of roughly fifty bowl games to keep everybody occupied. The choice seems like a no brainer to me, unless of course between now and Christmas somebody opens up a movie theater with a full bar, but even then I’d have to sit through this dud of a movie, and make no mistake, despite all the overblown adjectives attached to it, that is most certainly what it will be.
Are we having fun yet?
Courtesy Vogue magazine.
In any case, Hollywood’s all atwitter at the imminent release of Les Misérables, the movie adaptation of the Broadway musical which is based on the English translation of the original French novel centering on the improbably named Jean Valjean. Back in college we referred to this kind of product as having been “stepped on” a bit too much, that is, bulked up with suspicious fillers that extended the quantity but diluted the impact of the original ingredient. I’m referring of course to meatloaf for those of you who spent your time in academia studying rather than “cooking” at every possible opportunity. But I digress.
I have sat through the endless promotional video for this exercise in adaptive re-use approximately one hundred times — in the run up to virtually every movie I’ve taken in over the past six years. As a result, I have already seen far more of said musical extravaganza than I ever wanted to. With a running time of four and a half minutes, the Les Misérables First Look video is utterly excruciating. The absolute nadir, the point at which I actually squirm in my seat and feel the need to avert my eyes (every. single. time.) is when Mr Sexy Wolverine earnestly explains the delivery of his soliloquy (“What have I done. What have I done? Sweet Jesus, what have I done?” etc.) in a scenery-chewing moment that showcases all of his acting chops all at once as he emotes and pants his way through three lines of lyrics/dialogue. Watch it at your own risk, but don’t say you weren’t warned.
The rest of the cast is similarly insufferable in their apparent conviction that filming a musical with real singing is second only to splitting the atom in the pantheon of human accomplishment. Director Tom Hooper, who inexplicably chose to follow up The King’s Speech with this mess, observes that there’s “something false about people singing to playback.” Listen Tom, you seem like a nice guy, but you’re an idiot. There’s something false about people randomly bursting into song in the middle of a conversation, backed up by a 70 piece orchestra. I’m sorry to be the one to break this to you, but there is no way any musical is ever going to be anything but affected and unbelievable, which is why I never watch them.
That haircut. I feel you, Anne.
via deadline.com
Then of course there’s the barbering of Anne Hathaway to be endured — I’m referring of course to her movie haircut rather than the unfortunate wardrobe malfunction. I suppose I’d probably sob my way through the filming too if I’d foolishly agreed to have my head shorn for a turkey like this. Really, not since GI Jane have so many locks been sacrificed for so little gain.
Today I read a review of the movie that, inadvertently, sums up my dislike for it.
Haven’t we all Felt enough? Isn’t there ample squalor in my living room by four pm on Christmas Day? Why add more sobbing to the holidays?
And don’t you even think of singing your response.
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Posted in Commentary, Holiday fare
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Tags: Anne Hathaway, Christmas, Hugh Jackman, Humor, Les Miserables movie, scenery chewing, Tom Hooper, Wolverine