Saturday, October 03, 2009

Jewish men, baked Doritos, and more

*This is the inaugural I-have-Internet-at-home post.*

-Perhaps it's because I'm so keenly aware that his mother is the gender historian, but I was sort of shocked to see that A.O. Scott's essay on Jews and Jewish identity in the movies dealt only with Jewish men. But it's understandable - as movies would have it, Jews are Jewish men. And, really, in the Roth-Allen-led world of entertainment by and about Jews, men generally are Jewish men - it's sort of an all-Jewish-men, all-Gentile-women universe. Someone should be the Poet of the other way around, but I'm not volunteering.

-This I find upsetting: "The new policy [banning bakesales in NYC schools] also requires that vending machines, which generate millions of dollars for school sports, be supplied with snacks such as reduced-fat Baked Doritos and low-sugar granola bars." Not to get all Alice Waters' real-food-movement-ish on WWPD's readership, but wouldn't it be better to, I don't know, encourage baking from scratch (if not at home, than somewhere in the school) than to effectively ban doing so in favor of pushing the very sort of 'lite' foods people are known to gorge on thinking they're 'being good' and all that nonsense? I find it hard to believe that one moderately-sized butter-based pastry a day on top of a non-disastrous diet would do most teenagers (or, ahem, 20-somethings) any harm.

-After some butter-based pastry consumption, this is how I spent part of my afternoon:


"Moi, je préfère Camus."


"I could be wrong, but I believe I'm not the only one of my kind!"


"Would you believe what the humidity's done to my ear-fur?"

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

One could argue that Scott is mostly talking about himself.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

One could, but what of the fact that he's apparently (I hadn't known this before he mentioned it) the product of a Jewish woman - non-Jewish man pairing, which might have made him more attuned to such matters.

Withywindle said...

Have I recommended to you before Rebecca Goldstein's The Mind-Body Problem?