"I'm glad that I didn't get arrested, and I'm glad that we get to feed Annie this banana."

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I'm watching that because I was reading this NYT article, "'Errands' Should Be the Most Boring Show on the Internet/Fighting a traffic ticket. Hanging a curtain. Installing an air-conditioner. With his cult-hit online series, Noah Blau has made the mundane fascinating" (gift link).

As a student at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Blau grew engrossed in the work of cinéma vérité auteurs like Frederick Wiseman and Ross McElwee while also immersing himself in the New York canon of John Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese.

“Scorsese’s ‘After Hours’ is like the ultimate errand,” he said. “That would be my dream episode — for someone to get so sidetracked on their errand that they get chased through SoHo by an angry mob, like in the film.”

That pushes all the right buttons for me. Also made me think of one of my favorite TV shows, "How to with John Wilson."

But I do have to home in on "Cops are usually kind of nice to me." How casually people enjoy their privileges. I need to check on how the heavy rains affected the people in the Corey Ruiz Autonomous Zone. 

ADDED: My son John has "17 thoughts on After Hours."

"Dressed in a strange tuxedo/tutu combination with the blanched face of a heroin addict, he opens with a menacing prowl round the empty stage, pausing to stare contemptuously at the audience while eating a banana."

My favorite sentence in "A Midsummer Night’s Dream review — ruined by a needlessly shocking finale/Headlong Theatre’s production turns the Bard’s tricksy comedy into a pitch black ballet-themed spectacle full of spite and horror" (London Times).

"A British swimmer sustained by bananas and painkillers has become the first person to circumnavigate Hong Kong’s largest island..."

"... a distance equivalent to swimming across the Channel and back again. Simon Holliday, 46, from Ashford in Kent, completed the 40.3-mile circuit of Lantau Island on Friday in 20 hours 57 minutes. Half an hour later, he was followed by Edie Hu of the United States, the first woman to make the swim. They did not wear wetsuits — marathon swim rules mean they are not allowed in waters above 20C — so the chill was one of their biggest challenges.... The three swimmers were followed by a support team in two boats and two kayaks. They were fed in the water every 45 minutes with snacks such as chocolate, jelly babies and bananas."

From "British man is first to swim round Hong Kong’s biggest island/Simon Holliday won the 40-mile race round Lantau — the equivalent of swimming the Channel and back — as competitors battled tides, hallucinations and cramp" (London Times).

20C = 68° Fahrenheit.

A quote from Hu (the woman): "I started getting a little loopy. I was getting sleepy and actually dozing off [in the water].

"Long before Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a wall, she made 'Apple,' a piece of fresh fruit on a stand..."

"... at the Indica gallery in London. (Lennon, naughtily and biblically, took a chomp.) I am not an Ono-phile who wants to wallow overmuch in this kind of art, but applaud Sheff’s book as an important corrective to years of bad P.R. He’s done the opposite of a hatchet job, putting his subject back together branch by branch, like a forester. (Climbing trees is a big theme in her work.) He argues convincingly for her as survivor, feminist, avant-gardist, political activist and world-class sass...."

Writes Alexandra Jacobs, in "Yoko Ono, Demonized No Longer/David Sheff’s new biography convincingly argues for John Lennon’s widow as a feminist, activist, avant-garde artist and world-class sass" (NYT).

"Yoko, meaning 'ocean child,' was born in 1933 in Tokyo to wealthy but cold parents. She didn’t meet her father until she was 2½, and her mother was vain and germophobic. 'Even now I find it unpleasant to sit on a cushion or chair that still retains the temperature of somebody who had just been sitting there,' Ono once wrote."

Eschewing an irritatingly newsy story, I looked back into my archive to confirm that I had eschewed it the first time around.

Chew on this, from 2019:

December 8, 2019

Part of blogging is choosing what not to blog.

There's one thing in the last few days that so many people seemed to think needed to be blogged (or tweeted or Facebooked) about, and I knew not to be part of the virality. It's nothing that involved anyone dying or anything evil, just something where I could see people were accepting a cultural con and doing free PR for somebody. There's an additional development that makes it more obvious that it was that sort of thing, but many people are doing another post about that. I'm pleased with myself for passing on this story, which I won't identify because that's my point. I didn't let myself be used in someone else's promotion. Didn't do it before, and won't do it now.

ADDED: I said "I won't do it now," when "now" was 4:57 a.m., but I will do it now, at 2:58 p.m., because the post did get people guessing, and I want to recognize the winner, who posted at 8:11 a.m.  The winner is dustbunny, who said: "The duct-taped banana art scam."

"The world Lizzo has built around herself is essentially a cult: it’s dependent on everyone thinking the same extreme, bizarre, contradictory things as she does."

"You find it a lot nowadays: in the arts; politics, obviously; even in banks, for God’s sake. People rush to reinforce warped thought systems, like the pathetic Beyoncé, who has constantly sucked up to Lizzo, chasing the fat dollar. Until last week, of course, when the allegations came out, and then it was as if Lizzo had died: no regular shout-out from Beyoncé on her tour any more."

Writes Camilla Long, in "If you sign up to work in the seedy world of Lizzo, you must expect some XXXL lunacy" (London Times).

"Do you think we’d raise a six-year-old child in a Versailles-like palazzo? We’ve already got a house."

Said Andrea Giambruno, quoted in "Giorgia Meloni will turn down PM’s palace to stay in the family home, says partner" (London Times).

Meloni, 45, will stay in her house in Mostacciano, a suburb of the capital, and will not move to the 16th century Palazzo Chigi in the heart of the city that prime ministers normally use as an office and residence.

Giambruno is Meloni's partner.

Meloni has praised Giambruno as being “one of the few men in the world capable of not suffering if they have a successful woman next to them”. They met when Meloni appeared as a guest on a programme Giambruno worked on. Just before she went on air, he whisked a banana she had been eating out of her hands to save her from embarrassment.

 I had a moment of confusion, having forgotten that, in Italy, Andrea is a man's name.

"The Turkish government said this week that it has opened deportation proceedings against at least seven Syrian nationals accused of eating bananas in a 'provocative' way while participating in a TikTok video challenge..."

"... in a move that underscores rising hostility toward Syrians in a country with a reputation for being welcoming to refugees. The challenge was inspired by an Oct. 17 encounter on the streets of Istanbul that was captured on video, during which a man complained that he could not afford bananas, a staple that has fallen out of the reach of many consumers amid a poor economy. Turning to a female Syrian student, he alleged that refugees from Syria were buying the fruit by the 'kilos,' a reference to false rumors that displaced people were living in luxury off Turkish taxpayer largesse. In response, Syrians in Turkey and elsewhere posted videos of themselves eating bananas to poke fun at the incident. In one video, a group of young Syrians sat around the room, chuckling as they ate their fruit."

 
WaPo reports.

Skimming that, I got confused and thought the "provocative" banana-eating was something like this. You don't really need to look at that to know what it is. You know what it is. 

But it was just people engaged in typical banana-eating, like you see in that "one video" linked above. I experienced secondary confusion thinking the style — American style? — of taking a series of bites from the whole banana looks obscene in some countries. But no, it was just showing off that they had bananas and that it was absurd to think of access to bananas as a mark of a life of luxury.

"Banana skins have been trendy among vegans since at least 2019, when online recipes began circulating for treating the peels like bacon."

"At around the same time, the pulled not-pork had its first brush with internet fame, courtesy of the Canadian blogger Melissa Copeland, who published an explainer — and recipe — on her site the Stingy Vegan along with a video on Facebook. She’d developed it after learning that vegans in Venezuela use bananas’ outer jackets for an alternative to carne mechada (shredded beef), and in Brazil a similar swap is popular in a dish known as carne louca (or 'crazy meat')." 

 From "Think Outside the Banana. Eat the Peel. After the British chefs Nadiya Hussain and Nigella Lawson developed recipes using banana skins, the British cooking public is perplexed" (NYT). 

Speaking of crazy, the NYT article fails to mention that commercially grown bananas have a lot of pesticide in the peels. When I've seen discussions of eating banana peels elsewhere, there's always been a prominent warning that you've got to use organically grown bananas. 

There's very little reason to eat banana peels (unless you're desperately starving). A caption there says banana peels are "[c]onsidered useless scraps by many home cooks," but many other home cooks know that they're great for composting... and growing some vegetables that are genuinely tasty. 

What's the point of eating the skins? That they're "trendy"?! If that's your reason, you're a mark. Good luck! There's also the idea that you should make a fetish out of not wasting anything. One of the "cooks" discussed in the article is said to be "an expert on no-waste cuisine," but what her expertise has led her to, when it comes to banana peels, is puréeing them and sneaking the resulting goo into cake batter and smoothies.

Is there a flavor contribution of any significance?

In truth, the flavor of the cooked skins isn’t too pronounced — it’s subtle, with a polite suggestion of bitterness, and a slight floral note on the finish.

The answer to my question is, apparently, no, but points to the NYT author for coming up with "a polite suggestion of bitterness." That's funny, and I get the point, which I take it is: Don't eat banana peels.

"Her art comes to life by oxidization. Just like apples, bananas oxidize, or turn brown, as the enzymes in their cells are released and interact with the oxygen in the air."

"Cells that are damaged — because they’ve been poked with a fork or dropped on the floor — brown faster. By varying when she applied the marks, Chojnicka discovered that she could create a palette of shades, resulting in surprisingly intricate pictures." 

From "Bored in the pandemic, she made art by bruising bananas. Now she has an international following" (WaPo), which is all about this Instagram feed. It's not high art. It's stuff like this:

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Yes, that gets you an article in The Washington Post these days. Got to keep up with the fads. Speaking of fads, bananas, and "high art," remember the 60s fad of getting high from banana skins and wondering if "Mellow Yellow" was about that? 

Ah, yes, here — Atlas Obscura has an article about it: "Smoking Banana Peels Is the Greatest Drug Hoax of All Time/They called it mellow yellow" ("Donovan would later state definitively that the song was actually written about a yellow vibrator...").

ADDED: I was curious about my use of the word "skins" — "banana skins" — instead of the more normal "banana peels." What came over me? I googled and was very amused to see that "Banana peel" has its own Wikipedia page. It's not just a subsection under "Banana." 

Anyway, there I learn that "banana skins" is the British term. The subsections with the "Banana peels" article are: "Uses," "Culinary Uses," "In a comical context," "Peeling methods," and "Psychoactive effects of banana peels." Under the "comical" heading, we get the serious science of why banana peels provide such a slippery surface:

The coefficient of friction of banana peel on a linoleum surface was measured at just 0.07, about half that of lubricated metal on metal. Researchers attribute this to the crushing of the natural polysaccharide follicular gel, releasing a homogenous sol.

*** 

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

"Though they have terrible eyesight, the rats are ideal for such work, with their extraordinary sense of smell and their light weight – they are too light to trigger the mines."

"When they detect a mine, they lightly scratch atop it, signaling to their handler what they've found. Their reward: a banana."

From "Hero Rat Wins A Top Animal Award For Sniffing Out Land Mines" (NPR). Elsewhere, I've seen it written that this rat "won a medal," and, indeed, the president of the U.K. charity that honored the animal said "This is the very first time in our 77-year history of honoring animals that we will have presented a medal to a rat." They call it a medal, so that makes it a medal.

It's a very useful rat, obviously, but it's not choosing benefit us people (or even other rats). It's simply doing what reliably produces a banana. It has no idea of the danger of a land mine, and there doesn't seem to be any danger for the lightweight creature, certainly nothing that the rat knows about, so there is no courage involved other than what courage it takes to hang around human beings for the sake of banana.

Show me a rat that has displayed heroism. This isn't that rat. But the medal is for us humans, to feel pleased with the contribution of a rat. The rat doesn't care about a medal. It cares about a banana.

"Lena Stringari, the Guggenheim’s chief conservator, said the instructions will be quite easy to follow and are quite complete in addressing questions like how often to change bananas..."

"... (7 to 10 days) and where to affix them ('175 cm above ground'). 'Of all the works I have to confront, this is probably one of the simplest,' Ms. Stringari said. 'It’s duct tape and a banana,' she added. The conservation of conceptual art is not always so straightforward for museums increasingly asked to preserve works made from of all kinds of ephemeral substances, like food. How does one care for a scale model of an Algerian city made out of couscous? A sculpture made of interlocking tortillas? Fruit stuck on a coatrack? (All works the Guggenheim has shown.)... 'Once you think art is an idea and the material is secondary then it does not matter if that material lasts for a long time,”' said Melissa Chiu, director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian in Washington. The Hirshhorn has its own conservation specialists who tend to art created from 'time-based' materials that degrade. 'A lot of them are really challenging. The museum’s role in a way is to preserve the work forever.'"

From "It’s a Banana. It’s Art. And Now It’s the Guggenheim’s Problem/Ephemeral works of art, like Maurizio Cattelan’s creation out of fruit, can often pose conservation challenges for the museums that have them" (NYT).

Highly rated comment: "This type of work is infuriating. It puts the rest of us creative types in the awkward position of defending support for the arts when this is what that support is being used for. Sure, in better times, the conversation sparked by the 'work' has value, but the tone deaf absurdity of the thing itself plus its maintenance in this time of national trauma is a bit grotesque."

Maybe work that causes you to think deeply about time and decay is especially valuable during a national trauma.

"In the fall of 2014, Greta stopped eating....Greta had her first panic attack one day in September, when the family was baking cinnamon buns..."

"... and her parents encouraged her to eat some. When Greta refused, Svante and Malena yelled at her to obey. Their daughter, Malena writes, let out 'an abysmal howl that lasts for over forty minutes.'... On the recommendation of doctors, the family started keeping a list on the wall of how much she ate every day and how long it took her to eat it. ('Breakfast: 1/3 banana. Time: 53 minutes.') If the consistency of Greta’s gnocchi wasn’t perfect, she rejected it. Too many gnocchi on a plate and she was overwhelmed. ('Lunch: 5 gnocchi. Time: 2 hours and 10 minutes.') Greta stopped speaking with anyone but the members of her immediate family... In early 2015, Greta finally received a set of diagnoses: Asperger’s, high-functioning autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as selective mutism. She started taking an antidepressant called sertraline. But, Malena writes, 'What happened to our daughter can’t be explained simply by a medical acronym.' Instead, Greta was simply exhibiting the only rational response to the world around her: 'In the end, she simply couldn’t reconcile the contradictions of modern life.'... Malena does not pinpoint the moment when climate change became Greta’s particular obsession; nor does she question the rightness of her daughter’s response. 'Greta has a diagnosis, but it doesn’t rule out that she’s right and the rest of us have got it all wrong,' she concludes. Greta sees our carbon dioxide 'transforming the atmosphere into a gigantic, visible garbage dump.' The hamburger on her plate is no longer food but 'a ground up muscle from a living being with feelings, awareness and a soul.'"

From "How Greta Thunberg Transformed Existential Dread Into a Movement" by Emily Witt (in The New Yorker).

Merry Christmas!

I hope you get what you want.

Part of blogging is choosing what not to blog.

There's one thing in the last few days that so many people seemed to think needed to be blogged (or tweeted or Facebooked) about, and I knew not to be part of the virality. It's nothing that involved anyone dying or anything evil, just something where I could see people were accepting a cultural con and doing free PR for somebody. There's an additional development that makes it more obvious that it was that sort of thing, but many people are doing another post about that. I'm pleased with myself for passing on this story, which I won't identify because that's my point. I didn't let myself be used in someone else's promotion. Didn't do it before, and won't do it now.

ADDED: I said "I won't do it now," when "now" was 4:57 a.m., but I will do it now, at 2:58 p.m., because the post did get people guessing, and I want to recognize the winner, who posted at 8:11 a.m.  The winner is dustbunny, who said: "The duct-taped banana art scam."

"Colleen McCann is a former fashion stylist who now offers a full array of shamanic services — crystals, sage-burning, energy-channeling..."

"... for a client base of music executives, admen, fashionistas, Wall Street titans and staffers for the lifestyle empire known as Goop (she’s its in-house shaman and crystals expert). One of her specific market niches: scrubbing bad energies from their wardrobes. It all started one night a decade ago, she says, when she was trying to get a 2 a.m. sandwich at a New York bodega. She was struck by a clairvoyant vision — a voice, really, that warned her of a fight that was about to occur over the price of the bananas. What followed was a long string of coincidences, strange encounters and psychic consultations, somehow culminating in her enrollment in shaman school."

From "The wellness revolution has reached its shamans-for-hire stage" (WaPo).

And doesn't it always go like that? It starts with a sandwich... and then visions of bananas....

"I've been rethinking my spirit animal. I'm not sure how souls are transpositioned when we pass over to the great beyond."

"Perhaps because of my primate heritage I've always been partial to tree dwelling animals. Bonobos look like they have a pretty good deal, but they're a little too hyper for me. Althouse in a previous blog post really blew the lid ofd squirrels. Nothing much to recommend their manic, futile lives...... Of all tree dwelling creatures I'm most enamored of the sloth. They show an economy of effort in their struggles with existence, and their sad eyes demonstrate a zen awareness of the underlying futility of those struggles. I don't know how much say you're given in your choice for the next manifestation, but I would be comfortable with reincarnation as a sloth. Why wait? The way that that Kafka guy became a cockroach, I have evolved into a sloth. I don't cling to a tree branch, but I spend a lot of time on my posturpedic mattress. You can changer the position of the bed without ever leaving it. In some ways it's slothier than a tree branch."

Wrote William in last night's café. What I said about squirrels — in the first post of the day yesterday — was:

Squirrels don't have the brainpower to think of committing suicide. They don't even have the wits to think of not bothering to get food and just to waste away because what is the point of all this skittering around collecting nuts? They don't even think of scampering to another spot on the globe to see if the nuts taste different somewhere out there. And they don't think of throwing themselves off a high limb and ending it all. I have seen from my window squirrels falling from high in a tree. They hit the ground and immediately get up and run. Run run run. Get get get. It never stops until death snatches them. They don't go hurling themselves into the arms of death. It's just not a squirrel concept. I know. I read their mind from my vantage point here at the computer in front of the big window looking out on the trees.

The post had been about how to use all the mesclun from the garden, the potential to make a smoothie, the related need for a frozen banana "squirreled... away in the freezer," and a video of an squirrel — a Viennese squirrel — getting fed a banana. I only brought up suicide in the comments because Loren W Laurent, dragging in the demise of Anthony Bourdain, said:

The squirrel doesn't need to travel the world, compulsively looking for new tastes to satiate the hole in the self of wanting more.

Respect the squirrel....

For the squirrel survival is enough.

The kindness of a banana is magic.

Appreciate magic; don't expect it.

Don't become addicted to it.

Failed junkie.

What to do with the garden's overflowing supply of mesclun.

I had the idea of making smoothies... but what else goes in it? And would it be any good? Googling, I found, "Creative Ways to Use Tender Greens, Because Salad Fatigue Is Real" in Bon Appetit. The first idea is my first idea, the smoothie:

If you put kale in your smoothies, you'd better believe you can add tender greens, too. In fact, greens like mesclun and soft lettuces are sweeter than kale, and combine well with fruits and herbs. We'd steer clear of arugula, though—it can be assertively peppery.

That linked to "The Greenest Smoothie," which is one of those too-many-ingredients recipes. And there's one ingredient — frozen banana — that I think takes over a week of prep time if you haven't already ripened bananas and squirreled them away in the freezer. But I do come away with the idea that ginger and frozen pineapple could go in there. Matcha? Hmm. Why? I suspect Bon Appetit of needing to be special, not normal, and I just want normal.

I think I'm going to blend all that mesclun with some fresh orange juice, because orange juice is what I happen to have in the house. Isn't that the point of smoothies — using up your leftovers? Thought of like that, the blender seems like a garbage disposal. Noisy manufacturers of sludge.

Emma Sulkowicz (of "Mattress Performance" fame) has a new gallery show that inquires into Asian-Amercan identity.

The "Mattress Performance" was so much about female identity that perhaps you did not even notice Sulkowicz's ethnic performance... or maybe you thought it would seem anti-Semitic to notice, because you think of Sulkowicz as Jewish. But you were wrong! From HuffPo:

“I realized so many things were related to being an Asian woman. I didn’t report it all because I’m Asian and told not to have emotions and just be successful,” they told HuffPost. “Now I’m having my first show that explores where race really intersects with feminism.”

Asian! It turns out Sulkowicz's mother is half Japanese and half Chinese.

One of the more commanding pieces of their exhibit showcases a banana sliced with a knife, a subversive statement on both gender and race, Sulkowicz explains. The piece is dedicated to their sister and contains a video of her cutting the banana and designating it a phallic symbol. The banana also represents the Asian-American experience.

“Banana is a term for Asians who are too Americanized. That’s a source of vulnerability,” Sulkowicz said, explaining that the knife cutting through the banana comes from a place of anger as well.

“We identify ourselves as angry Asians,” they added.

I had to stop and think about the pronouns. Did that "we" go with "they" and refer only to Sulkowicz, or is Sulkowicz speaking for Asians in general, expressing their anger via penis-cutting? I think it's the latter, because in the first quote, above, Sulkowicz uses "I" repeatedly.

Sulkowicz’s parents are represented in the exhibit, too. A suspended tea ceremony represents their mother, who is half Chinese, half Japanese.... An orb containing a bagel, fixings and iced coffee represents Sulkowicz’s Jewish father’s longstanding Sunday tradition....

Awfully stereotypical objects — tea for Chinese/Japanese and bagel for Jewish.

Sulkowicz describes a bowl containing Cheetos and chopsticks as being inspired their friend, Mae, who is half Chinese and half Japanese. “Mae eats Cheetos with chopsticks. That’s such a boiled-down example of growing up mixed-race Asian in New York. You’re eating American trash but with an Asian tool. It’s a moment I wanted to capture.”

Or Mae doesn't like getting that orange dust on her fingers. Quite sensible to eat Cheetos with chopsticks. Reminds me of how I eat a banana with a knife and fork. And I want to stress that I do that because I like to keep my hands clean, not because I'm expressing hostility toward genders and ethnicities that some people think of when they see a banana.

“It’s hard to be taken seriously as Asian woman in art world,” they said. “I feel highly sexualized. I’m so sick of men who come up to me after a performance and say, ‘Do you think anyone would care about your artwork if you weren’t pretty?’ When will you leave any room for my artwork to speak for itself?”

Sulkowicz tells us what men tell Sulkowicz,  that Sulkowicz is pretty. Why didn't Sulkowicz leave us any room to judge for ourselves — whether Sulkowicz is pretty and whether we should direct our attention to the question whether Sulkowicz is pretty? But I won't take the bait. I'll do what I would have done without being criticized for failing to do, let the artwork speak for itself. It seems to be a collection of obvious stereotypes and heavy-handed symbols that don't really say anything about the large group of individuals that are being aggressively clustered into a set called "Asians."

The interpretation of bananas.

I don't know whom to believe here — "Frat Retreat Ends Early after Students ‘Frightened’ by a Banana Peel" — but whether Ryan Swanson is lying or not when he says he put a banana peel in a tree because he couldn't find a garbage can, this is one hell of an abject nonapology:

I want to sincerely apologize for the events that took place this past weekend. Although unintentional, there is no excuse for the pain that was caused to members of our community. I want to thank my friends in the NPHC for their candid and constructive conversations that we have continued to have. I have much to learn and look forward to doing such and encourage all members of our university community to do the same. We must all keep in mind how our actions affect those around us differently.

Swanson says he has "much to learn" and, really, don't we all have an infinite amount to learn? Anything you do might be misunderstood by someone else, perhaps by someone who deserves empathy and perhaps by someone with powerful allies who will ruin your life if you don't anticipate how they will interpret something you say or do or even how people who hate you will claim to have interpreted something that really didn't confuse them at all.

And what about all the students who go to college for an education and get taught that their emotional stirrings — their fears about what something might mean — warrant attention and respect? Their misinterpretations count as real in the world that other people — including the once-privileged frat boy — must anticipate and guard against. Does that feel good enough or will it get old and, ultimately, just as insulting as the kind of old-fashioned expressions of racism of which the banana peel in the tree might have been reminiscent?

By the way, "How Did Slipping on a Banana Peel Become a Comedy Staple?"